Home Away from Home: Immigrant Narratives, Domesticity, and Coloniality in Contemporary Spanish Culture examines ideological, emotional, economic, and cultural phenomena brought about by migration through readings of works of literature and film featuring domestic workers. In the past thirty years, Spain has experienced a massive increase in immigration. Since the 1990s, immigrants have been increasingly female, as bilateral trade agreements, migration quotas, and immigration policies between Spain and its former colonies (including the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Equatorial Guinea, and the Philippines) have created jobs for foreign women in the domestic service sector. These migrations reveal that colonial histories continue to be structuring elements of Spanish national culture, even in a democratic era in which its former colonies are now independent. Migration has also transformed the demographic composition of Spain and has created complex new social relations around the axes of gender, race, and nationality. Representations of migrant domestic workers provide critical responses to immigration and its feminization, alongside profound engagements with how the Spanish nation has changed since the end of the Franco era in 1975. Throughout Home Away from Home, readings of works of literature and film show that texts concerning the transnational nature of domestic work uniquely provide a nuanced account of the cultural shifts occurring in late twentieth- through twenty-first-century Spain.

“Montgomery’s thoughtful craft is driven by immediacy and tension and grounded in emotional authenticity. ... A love letter to the intricacies of family and multitudinous black girlhood.” — Kirkus Reviews, starred "Home and Away shines a multicolored light on the myriad meanings of 'family' and how each plays a role in shaping who we are, what we do, and who we become. I didn't want it to end!" — Nic Stone, New York Times bestselling author of Dear Martin Tasia Quirk is young, Black, and fabulous. She's a senior, she's got great friends, and a supportive and wealthy family. She even plays football as the only girl on her private high school's team. But when she catches her mamma trying to stuff a mysterious box in the closet, her identity is suddenly called into question. Now Tasia’s determined to unravel the lies that have overtaken her life. Along the way, she discovers what family and forgiveness really mean, and that her answers don’t come without a fee. An artsy bisexual boy from the Valley could help her find them—but only if she stops fighting who she is, beyond the color of her skin.

A tale of misapprehensions, transformations and rose at lunch as one American couple quits their perfectly good jobs, packs up their house in Brooklyn and moves their family to rural France for a year. In their fantasy, bons mots would drip from every quaintly churlish local character, and their two non-French speaking daughters would soon make adorable Gallic best friends at the village school. Their clunky little American family would be magically transformed into graceful, fluent French people the moment they all donned berets. Yet despite the beauty of the landscape and the warmth of the air, things were not as the family had dreamed they would be. Nobody wore a beret, ever, and life with children in a foreign land proved more challenging than anyone had imagined. The book details the many delights of life in France, but also celebrates the all-too-human mistakes the family made as they bumbled towards magic during one year of their lives. In time, the family falls into the rhythm of daily life, rediscovering the only home that matters: the home they have in one another.

David French, potential independent candidate for the 2016 presidential election, and his wife Nancy deliver a powerful story of what happens when a person--or rather, a family--answers the call to serve their nation. David French picked up the newspaper in the comfort of his penthouse in Philadelphia, and read about a soldier - father of two - who was wounded in Iraq. Immediately, he was stricken with a question: Why him and not me? David was a 37-year-old father of two, a Harvard Law graduate and president of a free speech organization. In other words, he was used to pushing pencils, not toting M16s. His wife Nancy was raising two children and writing from home. She was worrying about field trips and playdates, not about her husband going to war. HOME AND AWAY chronicles not just a soldier at war, but a family at war - a husband in Iraq, a wife and children at home, greeting each day with hope and fear, facing the challenge with determination, tears, and more than a little joy.

How did Jews go from lives organized by synagogues, shul, and mikvehs to lives that—if explicitly Jewish at all—were conducted in Hillel houses, JCCs, Katz's, and even Chabad? In pre-emancipation Europe, most Jews followed Jewish law most of the time, but by the turn of the twentieth century, a new secular Jewish identity had begun to take shape. Homes Away From Home tells the story of Ashkenazi Jews as they made their way in European society in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, focusing on the Jewish communities of Paris, Berlin, and St. Petersburg. At a time of growing political enfranchisement for Jews within European nations, membership in the official Jewish community became increasingly optional, and Jews in turn created spaces and programs to meet new social needs. The contexts of Jewish life expanded beyond the confines of "traditional" Jewish spaces into sites of consumption and leisure, sometimes to the consternation of Jewish authorities. Sarah Wobick-Segev argues that the social practices that developed between 1890 and the 1930s—such as celebrating holydays at hotels and restaurants, or sending children to summer camp—fundamentally reshaped Jewish community, redefining and extending the boundaries of where Jewishness happened.

In 1886 in Alabama, an eleven-year-old African American girl and her family befriend and give refuge to a runaway Apache boy.