Princess of the Shtetl

Told in diary entries, this is the gripping, heartbreaking, and hilarious story of an 11-year-old girl growing up in a 19th-century shtetl who is certain her name will one day be known far and wide. If she had her wish, soon-to-be twelve-year-old Bunke would spend her days studying the Talmud and grow up to be a scholar—or perhaps a rabbi. But since she has the great misfortune of being born a girl, Bunke’s life mainly consists of caring for her younger siblings, helping her mother on market day, and tackling a seemingly never-ending litany of chores. When young, unmarried boys begin disappearing from her shtetl, kidnapped and placed in the Tsar’s army, Bunke fears for her brothers, but not for herself. For once, she thinks, being a girl has some benefit... Until, she is woken in the middle of the night and forced, by her parents, to marry a boy she hardly knows. As Bunke adjusts to married life, she discovers an unlikely friend in her new husband, who agrees to secretly teach her Hebrew and even introduces her to forbidden secular texts. She chronicles all this and more in her beloved diary and, in doing so, gains a new understanding of her place in the world as both a girl and a Jew—and how deeply both of those identities limit and create her.