Outskirts Press, INC.

“Someday we will all be together again in a home of our own.”

When Isak’s father is killed in a factory accident in America, his mother is left alone in Poland with four young children and no means of support. Her sisters in New York send them money to emigrate, but Mama worries that with her weak heart she will not pass the medical inspector’s scrutiny at Ellis Island. She does not know there will be harder challenges facing her, as her sisters plan to put her fatherless children in the Hebrew Orphan Asylum. Only Isak remains with Mama in the apartment of Tante Anna and the abusive Uncle Lou, who want to adopt him. He longs to join his brothers and sister in the “Castle on the Hill,” as he calls the orphanage, to escape his uncle’s harsh punishments. But the horrors of the institution begin to unfold during Mama’s and Isak’s monthly visits, as his siblings gradually reveal to their heartbroken mother the hunger, fear, and bullying they have to endure. Isak realizes he is caught between two worlds in a dilemma that seems to have no solution. Isak and the Oranges, a work of historic fiction, is a carefully researched story about the plight of orphans and half-orphans in New York City at the turn of the last century. It is based on the author’s father’s experiences as an immigrant child. The Hebrew Orphan Asylum was real, as were the child-rearing practices common at the turn of the last century. Today they would be considered child abuse, but at that time were thought to be “for the child’s own good.” Although the children left the orphanage well prepared for their future, nothing could erase the terrors of their early life or the stigma of being orphans.