Ghita Schwarz grew up in a family of postwar Jewish refugees. Her first novel, Displaced Persons, explores the struggles and joys of a small group of Holocaust survivors who meet in a refugee camp in occupied Germany and make their way to the United States, where they raise families and establish new identities and communities. A civil rights lawyer in New York, Ghita litigates cases on behalf of immigrants and others in federal and state courts. Her fiction and essays have appeared in The Believer, Ploughshares, and the San Francisco Bay Guardian.