Now this is a story about a poor immigrant family from Russia who has moved to America (1910) in hopes of a better life. They are poor and have little to eat, their clothes are ratty and the father depends on his four daughters and wife to work and bring in money, and he always gets the best food...but for me the saddest part of the novel is romance.
The eldest daughter Bessie is bounder age "old maid" she is nearing her 30s
she found a good hardworking man but to her father he was not good enough!
But the main reason why the father did not let her go was best she makes the highest wages! And he was too selfish to let her get married, he said no to her marriage because her boy friend refused to support the father.
Then the second daughter finds a rich piano playing man. But the father does not like him because he plays the piano on the Sabbath. His father then makes him stay away from her because her family was poor. She cried and cried. But when they reconnect her father turns him out and makes her choose between her father and her boyfriend, she chooses her father.
The third daughter was deeply inlove with a poor poet. They would write love letters back and forth to each other and felt that together they would be truly happly. But his poverty was all the father had to hear and he turned him out.
The father boasted about how he could get his daughters married so quickly he had no time to think about their happiness. The first man was for his second daughter, he was going to leave his eldest to become an old maid because she brought in good wages. He found a diamond seller and got her married off. But it turned out that he was a liar! He did not own the diamonds, he merely worked in the store and got fired for letting the second daughter wear them. She went hungary many nights before she came home for something to eat. But did the father take responcability? NO! He blamed the daughter telling her it was her fault that she did not see the flaw in his character, that she had to "sleep in the bed that she made."
He found a coats and furs salesman for the third daughter. She married him quickly just to get out of the house. She told her eldest sister of how she would always love her poet and that she only accepted the gifts from the coats and furs salesman to fill the void. She moved across the country. But she wrote home telling her parents that he was a gambler. But the father refused to let her come home because it would look bad in front of the neighbors. That "no one would believe that you left him, they would think he kicked her out." It was her fault that she didn't see the faults in him and that since she was six months older she was six months less pretty and less attractive to men, and that she was too far gone to find another husband. "She must sleep in the bed that she made."
This was about the time that I began to cry. I am a big sap for romance and I just cannot imagine how heartless a father could be! How could be not let his daughters marry the men they loved? Instead he found fake husbands for them, now they would be miserable for the rest of their lives! And on top of it, instead of taking the blame himself, he blamed in on them!!
AND!! He won't let the eldest daughter get married because he wants her to continue to support him. She can only get married to a man that is willinging to support his own familly and her father.
This is no doubt the sadness book I have ever read on heartbreak.
-Kathleen
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