Bread Givers: A Novel of Immigration and Women's Independence in New York

"Only if they cooked for men, and washed for men, and didn't nag and curse the men out of their homes: only if they let the men study the Torah in peace, then, maybe, they could push themselves into heaven with the men, to wait on them there."

Sara Smolinsky was the youngest daughter of a rabbi and these were the tenets of her world. But one day Sarah rebelled. She left home, got a job as an ironer, and took a room of her own. "This door was life. It was air. The bottom starting-point of be...