The rabbi came from the Slobodka Yeshiva; his congregation came from Broadway. The synagogue was a modest brick building a block from Broadway in the middle of that colorful New York neighborhood known fifty years ago as Hell's Kitchen. Between prayers on Yom Kippur you could hear a chorus of would-be Ruby Keelers tap-dancing in the rehearsal hall next door. This is the exuberant story of Bernard Birstein—his immigrant travels and travails in America, his ever-increasing family of five children and countless poor relations, and his adventurous rabbinical life. The narrator is his youngest daughter, Ann, the blond-haired enfant terrible who grew up to write six novels and now this captivating book.

Lois Ackerman watched her friends changing around her, and watched herself change as she sturggled to come to terms with her own intelligence in a time when intellignce and womanhood weren't supposed to mix; as she fell happily into the baffling predicaments of sex; and as she made her way nimbly around the compromises and capitulations that were claiming the brightest and best of her companions. This funny, touching novel radiates the aura of a fondly remembered, vanished age — a time not so innocent (and not so distant) as we might be tempted to believe.