The Society of Forgotten Wives
A Novel
Pam Jenoff
Coming soon! The Society of Forgotten Wives by Pam Jenoff will be available Feb 02, 2027.
Inspired by true events and her own family history, New York Times bestselling author Pam Jenoff tells a sweeping story of missing husbands, buried secrets, and the women who come together to reclaim their power.
Set in post-World War I New York City (1919), the plot centers on a historical phenomenon where Jewish men were abandoning their families in large numbers after the war, prompting the creation of a real-life community agency to help the stranded wives. When a Jewish housewife arrives to place an ad looking for her missing husband, Hazel Brister becomes entangled in investigating multiple vanished men and secrets tied to her own family history.
After grief and scandal shatter her carefully ordered world, Hazel leaves her privileged upbringing behind for a new life on the Lower East Side. Working at a small newspaper, she is trying to build a future from the wreckage of her past. But when a woman named Freyda arrives asking for help finding her vanished husband, Hazel is pulled into a mystery she never expected.
Hazel discovers there are a number of women who share Freyda's bizarre predicament, left to support children, survive disgrace, and piece together lives suddenly upended. She agrees to help them, in hopes of discovering the truth behind the missing husbands and writing the newspaper story about it that will launch her long-forgotten dream of becoming a journalist. Determined to uncover the truth, Hazel joins forces with an unlikely circle of sharp-witted, resourceful women, following a trail of secrets through the streets of New York to cities beyond. But their searches are blocked at every turn by cryptic secrets from the past and dark forces who want to stop them from finding the answers they seek.
As Hazel digs deeper, she realizes the mystery reaches far closer to home than she ever imagined, forcing her to reconsider everything she thought she knew about her family--and herself. What begins as a search for the missing men grows into something far greater: a testament to the lives women can build when they refuse to be defined by others. Inspired by extraordinary true events, The Society of Forgotten Wives is a transporting story of female solidarity, survival, and reclaiming one's own destiny.
About the Author
Pam Jenoff is the New York Times bestselling author of historical novels centered on the Second World War and the Holocaust. Her fiction gives voice to Jewish survivors, rescuers, and resisters, and to the quieter, often overlooked stories of women in wartime Europe.
Her work draws on a distinctive background. She earned degrees from George Washington University, the University of Cambridge, and the University of Pennsylvania Law School. She served as a special assistant to the Secretary of the Army at the Pentagon, and she later worked for the U.S. Consulate in Kraków, Poland, on Jewish communal and heritage issues. That experience shaped her debut, The Kommandant’s Girl, and her many novels set in occupied Poland and beyond.
Her books return to themes central to Jewish memory: hiding and rescue, the fragile bonds of family and chosen family, the moral complexity of survival, and the long aftermath of loss. The Winter Guest follows Polish sisters sheltering a Jewish American soldier. The Orphan’s Tale centers on a Jewish infant, a circus troupe, and the women who protect him. The Woman with the Blue Star tells of Jews hiding in the Kraków sewers. The Lost Girls of Paris traces women of the Allied resistance.
Jenoff lives near Philadelphia with her family and teaches law at Rutgers Law School.