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 Sara hungers for more. In defiance of her father, she breaks free, escaping home to see what the American dream holds for her.