NEW YORK’S JAZZ-AGE UNDERWORLD - DEBBY APPLEGATE & ROBERTA RICH

Sun Feb 11, 7:30pm        $16
DEBBY APPLEGATE
In Conversation with ROBERTA RICH (Roberta will appear on screen from Colima, Mexico)

DEBBY APPLEGATE / Madam: the Biography of Polly Adler, Icon of the Jazz Age
More than the biography of the remarkable Jewish madam Polly Adler, the queen of the underworld in Jazz Age New York, this is a colourful, funny and unorthodox history of Jewish life told through the perspective of a “good Jewish girl” from a Russian shtetl who immigrated to Brooklyn and rose to become “the Female Al Capone” and one of the most renowned Jewish-American women in the 20th century. Her brothels were underworld salons that catered to everyone from the
Vanderbilts and the Rockefellers to celebrity artists, politicians and gangsters. The New York Times Book Review praised Madam as a “fast-paced tale of radical, willful transformation,” and “a breathless tale told through extraordinary research.”

DEBBY APPLEGATE is a historian whose first book, The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher, won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography. She lives in Connecticut, USA.

ROBERTA RICH author of The Jazz Club Spy
The Jazz Club Spy is a riveting historical thriller about a Jewish cigarette girl in 1930s New York who recognizes the soldier who had burned down her Russian village years earlier in a pogrom, only to be swept up in a political conspiracy on the eve of World War II. From the gritty tenements to the glittering Jazz clubs of the 1930s, this is a thrilling novel about a brash young woman who must use all her wits to save the ones she loves.

ROBERTA RICH is the bestselling author of The Midwife of Venice, which was published in thirteen countries, The Harem Midwife, and A Trial in Venice. She lives in Vancouver and Colima, Mexico.