The publication of the novel Strange Ways by Rokhl Faygenberg in 1925 was greeted as a milestone in Yiddish literature. A full-length Yiddish novel by a woman was itself a rare event at the time, but a book dealing with a love affair between a married man and a woman from a religious home was almost unheard of. Rokhl Faygenberg defied the convention. With great sensitivity and intelligence she tells the story of the price her characters pay for living in a shtetl by big-city rules. Vividly set in a Polish shtetl at the turn of the twentieth century, this surprisingly modern story deals with an illicit love affair between a handsome and successful married man and a beautiful and sensitive career woman who entertains her many male friends in her literary salon. Affected by the arrival of the railroad, the shtetl residents begin to adopt the strange ways of a new generation who do not live as their parents and grandparents did before them. Sheyndel, the heroine, and Borukh, her lover, are universal types; but they have been fleshed out by the author into such real and believable people that we easily identify with them. The delicately etched love story with its many unexpected twists and turns is rendered in a fluid translation, making for gripping reading.