At fourteen Sophie Kamler crossed the Atlantic alone, from Poland to America. At sixteen she paid for her siblings and mother to follow. At eighteen, a penniless wife, then a mother of three, she defied New York gangsters. At fifty six, a widow, she married again only to be widowed a second time. Matriarch to a sprawling but tightly held family of descendants, hers is a story of ambition - of love given, withheld, slighted, sustained...