Ida and Her Daughters

Ida and Her Daughters is the story of a thirteen-year-old immigrant girl who flees the pogroms of early 20th century Russia with her father and older brother and creates a life for herself in America. Settling in Bangor, Maine with relatives, she is enamored of a young American who impregnates her and, after their marriage, they begin to raise three girls in a nine-year period-until he abandons her for another woman. This saga of Ida's struggles as well as her daughters' subsequent lives in twentieth-century America is gripping. Rhonda, the eldest, is forced into an arranged marriage; Ruth, the second, marries a husband who becomes embroiled with the Mafia, and the third, Debra, falls in love with an ambitious academic during the racial revolution of the 1960's and '70's in New York. Ida and Her Daughters is a panoramic view of twentieth-century America, from the experiences of an immigrant girl to the separate marriages of her three daughters. In this compelling novel, Ted Gross has explored the American family, its strengths and its weaknesses.