In 1931, under the cloud of the Great Depression, twenty-one-year-old Birdie, a Jewish New Yorker, loses her job at Macy's. Disenchanted with the American way, her growing belief in the Soviet system drives her to travel to Russia, where she has a romance with a writer who is denounced and sent to Siberia-but not before she becomes pregnant with his child. In her attempts to free him, Birdie is aided by an American journalist, whom she eventually...