She does so by detailing the lives of three Jewish women, all of them forced by cunning, deceitful men into leaving their East European homes and entering a miserable life of prostitution in the Americas. The main focus of the book is on brothels in Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro, but a similar situation in New York is discussed briefly - one of the women spent time there as well.

Vincent has done a great amount of research on the subject, but the book comes up short in several ways. For one, the narrative is somewhat disjointed - at times, the reader is uncertain of whether it deals with Buenos Aires or Rio. And the accounts are fragmented, picking up the story of one woman, then digressing to other subjects for several pages before resuming the original story, leaving the reader to pull the threads together. And, perhaps most important, there are gaps that surface every sooften in the narrative. The author asks questions or writes suppositions or surmises, for there are no records or other definitive  proofs.

The latter shortcoming is certainly to be expected, for the records on prostitution in general and these unfortunate victims in particular are sketchy at best. The mainstream Jewish communities of the cities wanted absolutely nothing to do with these women of ill-repute and ostracized them to the point of refusing to bury them in their communal cemeteries. And most of the women were, at best, barely literate and unable to record their stories for posterity.

The three women spotlighted are named Sophia Chamys, Rachel Liberman and Rebecca Freedman. While they all suffered similar fates, at least to some degree, their stories differ in significant ways. Chamys' story is the most tragic - her short life was marked by violent acts on the part of her "husband," a pimp named Isaac Boorosky. She died young and was buried in a Catholic cemetery. Liberman, on the other hand, managed to start an antique business and gain some respectability. When her former bosses refused to leave her alone, she went to the Buenos Aires police and brought about at least a measure of reform. But unfortunately, she too died young, as she was about to visit her family in Poland. Rebecca Freedman went from prostitution, in both New York and South America, to become a sort of one-woman  chevra kadisha  (burial society), caring for the bodies of her fellow prostitutes after they had established their own cemetery in Rio de Janeiro. Unlike the others, she lived to the age of 103, dying in 1984.

While the significant presence of prostitution represents a blot in modern Judaism, it was probably inevitable that, given the extreme difficulties faced by East European Jews in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, some would turn to this disreputable occupation. Their story merits being brought to light, for the bad must be told along with the good. Despite its flaws, this book constitutes a significant addition to modern Jewish historical scholarship.