In these stories, we meet a variety of Jews and non-Jews in modern Europe. Chana Blankshteyn had amassed a world of experience in the 1920s, when, in her 60s, she took up writing fiction in Yiddish. Born in Vilna around 1860, she had traveled to France and Germany as a young girl to further her education, had married and divorced and then married again, moved to Kiev with her second husband, and, after her second divorce, lived with a married daughter in St. Petersburg. Blankshteyn served as a nurse in the Russian army during WWI, before returning to her native...