During the Roaring 20s, everyone came to Pearl "Polly" Adler's Manhattan brothels, key gathering places where the celebrity elite mingled with high society and with violent figures of the underworld—and had a good time doing it. As a Jewish immigrant from eastern Europe, Adler's life is a classic American story of success and assimilation, and here Debby Applegate uses her story as a key to unpacking just what made the 1920s such a corrupt, glamorous, and transformational era.