While celebrating her brother's Bar Mitzvah on Coney Island, nine-year-old Rebecca Rubin disobeys by going off on her own, leaving her cousin Ana, a recent immigrant, alone.
Rebecca Rubin worries that her tenth birthday will be ruined because it falls during Passover, but her mother's cousin Max, an actor, takes her with him to a movie studio, where she makes friends with an actress and a set carpenter.
Nine-year-old Rebecca Rubin eagerly helps her cousin Ana, newly arrived from Russia, to adjust to life in New York City, but when their teacher says the two must sing together at a school assembly, Rebecca worries that her big moment will be ruined.
Ten-year-old Rebecca Rubin is injured during a strike at the sweatshop where her uncle and cousin work when she tries to give a speech, while keeping a big secret from her family.
While Rebecca Rubin helps her building's ailing superintendent take care of his homing pigeons, she puzzles over what to do with the Christmas centerpiece her teacher insisted she make but which has no place in her Jewish home.
Kidnapped from their parents during the Portuguese Inquisition and sent to work as slaves at a monastery in Brazil, two Jewish sisters attempt to make their way back to Europe to find their parents, but instead one becomes part of a group founding the first Jewish settlement in the United States.
Nine-year-old Rebecca Rubin, a Jewish girl living in New York in 1914, aspires to be an actress, despite her family's objection to it, and uses her acting skills to raise money to save her cousins in Russia from danger.
