Born in Transylvania at the turn of the century, Bella Cohen Spewack arrived with her mother on the streets of New York's Lower East Side in 1902 when she was three years old. At twenty-three, while working as a reporter in Berlin, she wrote this memoir of her early years. After returning to the United States, Bella and her husband, Sam Spewack, became successful playwrights, most notably for the Tony award-winning Broadway musical Kiss Me, Kate.