Relationships between mothers and daughters are exceptionally complex for all women. An uneasy balance between the fear of letting go and the desire for independence, the love shared between mothers and daughters can be volatile, tender, and exasperating.

Her Face in the Mirror explores this most difficult and affirming relationship in the lives of Jewish women through poems, stories, and personal essays. Daughters, many of them first- and second-generation Americans, write of frustration with what they see as their mothers' limited lives; their mothers write of fears for their daughters whose lives seem so different from their own.

For many the relationship is shaped by the feeling of being an outsider - as a Jew in America and a woman in Judaism - and it is always informed by the collective memory of the Holocaust. With passionate and resonant words, these writers search to be reconciled with their mothers and daughters and, ultimately, with their own identities. An extraordinary collection, Her Face in the Mirror is destined to become a classic.