Bread Givers

"The youngest of four daughters in a family that left Poland in the 1920s for the crowded tenements of New York City's Lower East Side, Sara Smolinsky has seen her sisters resign themselves under their rabbi father's iron fist to loveless marriages and empty futures. They are bread givers, working to feed the family while their father studies the Torah--according to which, as their father reminds them, a woman without her father or husband is less than nothing. But Sarah hungers for more and in defiance of her father she breaks free and escapes home to see what the American dream holds for her in this poignant coming-of-age tale and striking portrait of feminist rebellion"--