She was the exquisite daughter of a wealthy  Jewish merchant. From a charmed girlhood in opulent New  Orleans, she would be swept into the cataclysm of  the Civil War. Forced to choose between her duties  as a Southern wife and mother and her love for a  forbidden man, a forbidden cause, Miriam Raphael is  at the center of the whirlwind in a spellbinding  novel of divided loyalties and divided hearts.