Florence Reiss Kraut is a native New Yorker, raised and educated in four of the five boroughs of New York City. She holds a BA in English and a master’s in social work. She worked for thirty years as a clinician, a family therapist, and the CEO of a family service agency before retiring to write and travel widely. She has published personal essays for The New York Times and her fiction has appeared in journals including The Evening Street Press, SNReview, The Westchester Review, and others. She has three married children and nine grandchildren and lives with her husband in Rye, New York.

When Ida and her daughter Bessie flee a catastrophic pogrom in Ukraine for America in 1905, they believe their emigration will ensure that their children and grandchildren will be safe from harm. But choices and decisions made by one generation have ripple effects on those who come later—and in the decades that follow, family secrets, betrayals, and mistakes made in the name of love threaten the survival of the family: Bessie and Abe Weissman’s children struggle with the shattering effects of daughter Ruby’s mental illness, of Jenny’s love affair with her brother-in-law, of the disappearance of Ruby’s daughter as she flees her mother’s legacy, and of the accidental deaths of Irene’s husband and granddaughter.

A sweeping saga that follows three generations from the tenements of Brooklyn through WWII, from Woodstock to India, and from Spain to Israel, How to Make a Life is the story of a family who must learn to accept each other’s differences—or risk cutting ties with the very people who anchor their place in the world.

Street Corner Dreams is a family saga, a love story, a gangster tale, and a suspense story, set during Prohibition, the Spanish Flu epidemic, and the Depression. In 1914, Golda and her pregnant sister, Esther, embark from Europe for New York to meet Esther’s husband, Ben. When Esther dies on board giving birth, Golda gives up her dreams of independence, marries her brother-in-law, and devotes herself to the care for her sister’s child, Morty. The family struggles to survive in the teeming tenements of Brooklyn, where Jewish gangsters rule the streets. Their dreams are thwarted by the loss of their own child to the Spanish flu and then the Depression, when Ben’s poor business decisions get him into trouble with criminal loan sharks. Morty is studying to be an engineer and has fallen in love with Anna, the niece of an Italian gangster, but Morty feels he must rescue his father from crushing debt by asking a favor from a mobster friend. The power of the gangs proves too strong, however, and Morty is pulled into their orbit. When he flees, he’s forced to sacrifice his dream of engineering and desert his family and the woman he loves wondering if he can ever find a safe way back home.