Next Year in America is a book I wrote that tells the story of the roughly two million Jews who immigrated to the United States from Eastern Europe between 1881 and 1924. But rather than taking the traditional approach of telling this story through old primary sources and aging esoteric secondary sources, I tell their story through the lives and experiences of my own ancestors.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s plenty of history in this book: it begins with the origins of the Jews in Eastern Europe, and pays close attention as some familiar characters–Poland, Russia, Ukraine–emerge in the 17th and 18th centuries. It is around this point where we meet our first few human characters: my seventh-great-grandparents, Rubin and Fayga, who lived in the town of Staszow, Poland in the late 18th century.

From the beginnings of the first shtetls, the book continues through the life and times of the Russian Empire, times that proved so difficult for the Jews–just about entirely due to the Empire’s own doing–that two million out of the approximately five million who lived within its borders decided to leave. After a brief stop in London, I follow these immigrants (many of whom were borderline refugees) to the United States, where the overwhelming majority boldly set off to in hopes of a better life. There we find all kinds of interesting stories to tell: from rags to riches (and sometimes then back to rags), of religious reformation and cultural change, of the lasting legacy of the immigrant experience and intergenerational trauma it all-too-easily inflicted upon its participants.

The book evolved out of my own curiosity about my ancestors, about whom I knew very little (and, even after writing this book, I still know very little about). Where did they come from, and what was life like there? Why–and how, exactly–did they leave? What did they do when they got here, and how did they adapt to the very different world of 20th century America? But while I write most directly about my own ancestors and use their lives to retell the story of their generation as a whole, you can still plug in your own ancestors, too. After all, their experiences were likely very similar–their hometowns in Eastern Europe, their reasoning for coming to the United States, and how they got on with their lives once they were here. As James Joyce wrote, “in the particular is contained the universal.”

Next Year in America is available for sale in many online stores, including Amazon.