Bronx Heart-Jerusalem Soul is a mul­ti-faceted nov­el that offers the read­er much to think about pos­si­bly learn and more impor­tant­ly feel. Tyra Miller, a ten-year-old girl grow­ing up in the Bronx, grap­ples with the suf­fer­ing of her old­er sis­ter, Jessie, who is encased in a head-to-toe fifty pound plas­ter cast after a gru­el­ing surgery. As Jessie’s mis­ery and dis­ap­point­ments ever increase Tyra is bur­dened by guilt and has trou­ble main­tain­ing her faith in God. Her search leads her to Israel as a grad­u­ate stu­dent at the Hebrew Uni­ver­si­ty in Jerusalem in 1966. It is while Tyra is in Israel that the nov­el becomes ground­ed in a unique his­tor­i­cal per­spec­tive. Based on war diaries cor­re­spon­dence and doc­u­ments, Tyra and the oth­er for­eign stu­dents present an authen­tic pic­ture of how the Jew­ish peo­ple man­age to live through the tense month of May 1967 as the threat of anni­hi­la­tion looms heavy and Israel pre­pares for an all-out war. The simul­ta­ne­ous con­tra­dic­tion of exu­ber­ance of the June vic­to­ry jux­ta­posed against the mourn­ing of per­son­al loss adds to the emo­tion­al tur­moil of an exhil­a­rat­ed yet exhaust­ed peo­ple. War brings out resilience and courage in Tyra she nev­er thought she had, and though she real­izes there are no solu­tions to the imper­fec­tions of life, the sis­ters’ dif­fi­cult rec­on­cil­i­a­tion allows Tyra to chart an unex­pect­ed course on her way to happiness.