The volume under review is a welcome addition to the excellent studies on Habsburg Galicia that have appeared in recent years. These works have explored the expansion of the Habsburg bureaucracy and its effects on the Ukrainian- and Polish-speaking peasant population, modern politics, nationalism, urban culture, and World War I as well as Galicia's postwar legacies. Studies focusing on the Jews of Galicia have treated Habsburg loyalism, the development of modern politics, Zionism and Jewish national identification, Blood Libels and anti-Jewish violence, Haskalah, Hasidism, and Jewish integration and acculturation. Little attention, however, has been paid to the lives and struggles of Orthodox Jewish women. Based on rich and largely untapped archival sources, Rachel Manekin's book explores a profound crisis threatening the cohesion of Jewish families: in the last decades before World War I, hundreds of young Jewish women fled their religious homes and sought shelter in Cracow's Felician Sister's Convent and other Catholic institutions.

The acquisition of Galicia by the Habsburgs in the three Partitions of Poland during the late eighteenth century brought a significant number of Jews into the Habsburg Monarchy. Most of this Jewish population affiliated with one or another Hasidic movement. The Habsburg state sought to make these Jews, along with the other peoples of Galicia and of the monarchy, productive subjects. Among other changes, Jewish men became subject to military conscription, and Jewish children were, in theory, obligated to attend German-language schools.

The growth and expansion of the Habsburg school system took on greater dimensions in the wake of the 1867 constitutional laws that transformed the monarchy into Austria-Hungary. In Galicia, Orthodox Jewish communities endeavored to avoid sending their sons to Polish-language secular schools. In a stark contrast, the Orthodox leadership did not oppose sending daughters to the new schools. As a result, Jewish boys from religious families were steeped in intensified and expanded Jewish learning even as Jewish girls were increasingly exposed to and connected with the secular and non-Jewish Polish-speaking world. Manekin argues that this situation led many Orthodox Jewish girls to run away. They sought to escape arranged marriages to boys ignorant of Polish culture or to continue lives of interaction with the non-Jewish world. Some, but not all, converted to Catholicism.

In the most compelling chapters, Manekin reconstructs the stories of three such rebellious Jewish daughters: Michalina Araten, Debora Lewkowicz, and Anna Kluger. The complexities of the Habsburg legal landscape framed these and other similar cases. The state recognized the wishes of anyone fourteen years of age and older who sought to convert to another religion of their own volition. At the same time, children were formally subject to parental control until they completed their twenty-fourth year. In this legal context, if parents could demonstrate that third parties had assisted their daughter's flight, a legal case for kidnapping could be made and the authorities called upon to intervene and restore the child to the family.

Michalina Araten's wealthy father, Israel, made his case in the Vienna and Galician press. He claimed his daughter was the victim of kidnapping and forced conversion. Michalina insisted she sought refuge in the Cracow Convent and converted to Catholicism of her own free will. Debora Lewkowicz was a child of tavernkeepers from a small village near Wieliczka. Shocked that their daughter had become romantically involved with a Polish Catholic on her way to and from school, her parents hastily arranged a marriage with a religious Jewish boy. Debora ran to the Felician Sister's Convent and converted to Catholicism. She later reconverted to Judaism. Anna Kluger, a descendant of the founder of the conservative Sandz Hasidic dynasty, sued her parents to force them to support her financially and allow her to pursue university studies. The Habsburg court system ruled in her favor. In 1914, Anna earned her PhD from the University of Vienna. After attaining her degree, she became a high school teacher in a Cracow Jewish school.

Manekin's reconstruction of the lives of these women is deeply moving. The appendix includes excerpts from letters and other documents that recover their voices. These young women found themselves caught between a desire to continue and deepen contact with the non-Jewish world and bonds to their families and communities.

The final chapter looks at the development of the Beit Yaakov educational system and other institutions of learning for young Orthodox Jewish women. According to Manekin, these new schools were created in reaction to the crisis of the rebellious daughters. These schools did not, however, offer the kind of advanced Jewish text study central to the educational options for Orthodox Jewish boys or offer graduates the credentials necessary to enter university. They aimed at preventing women from abandoning their families and Orthodox Jewish society.

The stories Manekin masterfully relates in this volume elucidate the complex relationship between Jews, the Catholic Church, and local, regional, and central government structures in the late Habsburg Monarchy. This is an impressive contribution to Habsburg, Jewish, Polish, and women's history.