The Changelings

First published in 1955, The Changelings is a novel about a pair of stubborn adolescent girls who refuse to accept the racism and anti-Semitism of their respective communities. Their courage allows them to question and to cross over into the no-man's land of segregated urban neighborhoods claimed most recently by Jews, but now-in the early fifties-needed by African Americans. Anzia Yeziersky, in the New York Times, wrote that "in Judith, the author has created a portrait of a new kind of teenage gang leader, so imaginatively realized that she transcends mere realism."