Once there was a boy named Leonard who loved to sing and to act. His parents were immigrants who felt like aliens in America, and certainly didn't understand Leonard's drive to perform. "Learn to play the accordion," his father told him. "Actors starve, but at least musicians can eke out a living." But Leonard reached for the stars... and caught them. He moved to Hollywood, where he took acting lessons, and drove a taxi and took every role he could get. He worked hard, learned his lines, showed up on time, and studied his craft. Until one day he was offered the role of an alien science officer on a new TV show called Star Trek. Leonard knew what it felt like to be an alien. But did he want the role?

For fans of All-of-a-Kind Family , here is the true story of how Sarah Brenner, a poor girl from New York City’s Lower East Side, became Sydney Taylor: dancer, actress, and successful children’s book author. Sarah Brenner might have come from an all-of-a-kind family (five sisters who all dressed alike), but she was always one of a kind. Growing up in a Jewish immigrant family on New York’s impoverished Lower East Side, Sarah loved visiting the library, celebrating holidays with her family, and taking free dance classes at the Henry Street Settlement. But she was always aware of things that weren’t fair—whether it was that women couldn’t vote, or how girls were treated in her school, or that her parents had had to leave Europe because they were Jewish. When she grew up, Sarah changed her name to Sydney and became an actress and a dancer, but she never forgot the importance of fighting unfairness, whether it was anti-Semitism at her job or the low wages of workers. And when her daughter complained that it wasn’t fair that there were no books about Jewish children like her, Sydney put pen to paper and wrote a one-of-a-kind children’s book. From well-known Jewish children’s author Richard Michelson, this is the story of how Sarah became Sydney and how she showed children the joy of seeing their culture reflected on the page.

A young boy who loves to dance listens as his father retells the story of the night he was born, which coincided with the opening of the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem.

With his father gunned down in a petty robbery and his aunt haunted by the threats of the Gestapo, Richard Michelson's experiences growing up in Brooklyn were far from ordinary, yet they remain all too common--too much a part of ongoing violence--to be dismissed as merely private events, safely past. In Counting to Six Million he writes out memory, anxiety, and grief, worry over his wife and children, and the recurring clashes between love and cruelty that test wisdom with suffering, day after day.