Anna Shteynshleyger, a Russian- born Jewish émigré, left her country at age fifteen and grew up in suburban Maryland. Her series City of Destiny is an autobiographical chronicle of scenes from her own Orthodox Jewish community in Des Plaines, Illinois (nicknamed the “City of Destiny”) and her childhood neighborhood in Moscow.

City of Destiny (Schneur and Ester) shows nineteen- year- old Orthodox newlyweds in their new home. Each one is the child of a rabbi who came to the town to revive their religion among recent Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union. Although the couple’s marriage was not exactly arranged, in their close- knit, insular community, Ester and Schneur were matched up as they were the only two people of marrying age who suited each other. The composition suggests a modern, wry consideration of such a tradition: within one frame of the window, the couple stands on the porch beside the rigid parallel lines of its railing. This symmetrical and ordered arrangement, however, is offset by the wires chaotically strewn in the foreground.