The Shoemaker's Dream was the "American Dream" shared by millions of people speaking countless languages in countries around the world, and it brought to our shores the people who fashioned this vast and powerful nation. This iconic metaphor has served for generations to express the dreamers' hopes of achieving a better future for themselves and their families. This is a tale that resonates strongly today, when news media daily produce articles, editorials and letters to the editor about our current political embattlement over immigration. Like so many today, the shoemaker's relation whose adventures are told in these pages landed in America in 1910 speaking no English, with minimal financial resources, but endowed with boundless ambition, hope, energy, and desire. While building new lives, they built our country.

Here, in this novelized version of Bill Nemoyten's family history, we go beyond numbers about immigration and assimilation to relive life on the other side of the ocean. Unlike many tales of immigrants to the United States-or, more poetically named, America-which begin with their arrival on the shores of the "New World," Nemoyten takes us back to their origins. We learn about the life they left behind: the terror of pogroms led by tsarist soldiers or gentile neighbors, signaled by shouts and crying in the streets; the dreaded knock on the door when sons reached the age of conscription into army service for perhaps twenty years, from which all-too-many never returned; but also the pleasures of market days when these gatherings provided the main venue for buying, selling, and exchanging news of local events.

All this provides the context for Bill's narrative, one family's history that illuminates migration history writ small. He follows the ambitious adventures of Izzy Singer, formerly Israel Zynger, as he departs from Losice, Poland, and travels via Warsaw, Antwerp, London, Ellis Island, and New York City to Cleveland, where Bill would be born in 1928.

Along the way, there is adventure, romance, colorful characters, and the familiar American story of one son's skill and determination enabled him to send for his parents, two brothers and four sisters, saving them from oppression and the eventual murder of every Jew in Losice. Today, because of Izzy's courage and vision, there are hundreds of Singer family members in the U.S. and around the globe.