"With a new afterword"--Cover. "Meet the Ganguli family, new arrivals from Calcutta, trying their best to become Americans even as they pine for home. The name they bestow on their firstborn, Gogol, betrays all the conflicts of honoring tradition in a new world--conflicts that will haunt Gogol on his own winding path through divided loyalties, comic detours, and wrenching love affairs"--

"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...