The Palace of Justice Is Burning

Before she found her voice, she had to fight for her life.

After a sham marriage leaves her virtually imprisoned in a brothel, Rosa Apfelbaum—a young Jewish girl from Galicia—escapes and flees, ultimately, to Vienna. In the imperial capital, she endures the hunger and heartbreak of World War I, forges new relationships, and begins carving out a life with her pen.

As the old empire collapses, a new Vienna rises. In the progressive years of "Red Vienna," Rosa gives birth to a child and becomes an advice columnist for a feminist weekly championing sexual freedom and women's rights. Together with an idealistic young psychoanalyst, she explores a world where Freudian ideas are linked to social liberation.

But while Rosa investigates a mysterious psychoanalytic case, fights for women's right to tell their own stories, and deals with her own past traumas, political violence surges. As editors are murdered and marchers are shot, the justice system falters and civil strife intensifies.

In a progressive city threatened by fascist forces, Rosa—together with her family—must prepare once again to face an uncertain future.

"The Palace of Justice Is Burning is a remarkable feat of historical imagination... This is a novel that understands, as psychoanalysis does at its best, that the personal and the historical are inseparable." —Danielle Knafo, PhD, Author, Egon Schiele: A Self in Creation