Beyond the Ghetto Gates: Writer, Michelle Cameron

This is a conversation with Michelle Cameron on becoming who she is – a writer. Her story starts two centuries ago, Napoleon’s troops occupied the Italian port city of Ancona, freeing the city’s Jews from the ghetto. Michelle Cameron’s novel, Beyond the Ghetto Gates, is the story of the collision that ensued between two cultures, and one of love across religion, nation, and other walls…

Cameron’s tale is a fascinating, fictionalized foray into a bygone era, but the themes she addresses are still timely and, for many, still very personal: Antisemitism, gender roles, social roles… Cameron and her heroines grapple with these issues in a story that invites us to look at our own.

A conversation with the author. It begins, of course, with some history:

I was a reader long before I became a writer. The novels that spoke loudest to me were those that immersed me in other times and other lands. But rarely did I meet up with characters who shared my Jewish heritage and culture.