When Mereleh Luft arrived in New York as a teenager in 1914, she had big plans: to meet a man and start a Jewish family, and to earn enough money to bring the rest of her family over from Latvia. By the 1930s, however, she had little to show for her years in America; she’d been slaving away in garment factories, living in rented rooms, and clinging to a manipulative playboy who refused to marry her. Meanwhile, her family remained stuck in Latvia, even as Hitler’s armies marched east and made their escape a matter of life and death.

In a new biography, Luft’s daughter Lillian Faderman recounts her mother’s travails. Faderman is an award-winning historian best known for her books on lesbian history and for her first memoir,

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