The Russian Bride — Marcelle Bernstein

A marriage has been arranged...A very unlikely marriage...between Salka, olive-skinned and golden-eyed, and Leon, the experienced Viennese sensualist.

Salka's parents are far away in Russia, and her Hamburg cousins want her off their hands. Leon is rich, the scion of a Viennese banking family. What more can a dowryless girl hope for? Salka feels attracted to this powerful, intense man, but at moments she feels she hates him.

In the feverishly brilliant in-de-siecle Viennese world that becomes her home, Salka experiences the shattering heights of passion but also passion's limits. In the joy of loving, the agony of loss, in the bitterness of anti-Semitism that echoes the pogroms of her childhood, Salka never ceases to as herself, "What can a woman do?"

She finds her answer in the fulfillment of a haunting prophecy told to her by a rabbi when she was a child.