Ellen Weinstein

"Five children, from five different cultures and in five different decades, grow up in the same building on the Lower East Side of New York City. Jenny Epstein and her family arrive on a steamship from Russia in the 1910s. Jenny writes letters in Yiddish to her grandmother, while practicing her English in her new neighborhood. By the 1930s, when Anna Cozzi and her Italian family move into the building, Jenny has become a teacher in Anna's school....

Growing up in the mountains of Japan, Yayoi Kusama (b. 1929) dreamed of becoming an artist. One day, she had a vision in which the world and everything in it-the plants, the people, the sky-were covered in polka dots. She began to cover her paintings, drawings, sculptures, and even her body with dots. As she grew up, she traveled all around the world, from Tokyo to Seattle, New York to Venice, and brought her dots with her. Different people saw these...