In 1890 you could pick up gold from the main streets of New York City. At least that's what someone told Harris and Sarah Cohen, and they believed it. Didn't everybody know that all Americans were millionaires? And wouldn't anything be better than their obscure Russian village where the soil was hard and the people cruel, were just being a Jew was reason enough to be taunted, persecuted, cheated?

Harris Cohen packed his belongings into two wood crates and boarded the freighter headed for the promised land. Sarah followed later. But the promised land turned out to have air murky with factory set, garbage in the ditches, and smoke–blackened buildings with apartments that smelled like bacon grease.

Into this atmosphere, broken dreams, frustration, and anger. Rebecca Cohen was born. It didn't take her long to realize that women were not worth much. Women had to obey in work or else they were beaten. Her father's heavy boot hitter on the head and knocked her unconscious because she had not done what he commanded. Her brothers hitched her to the plow, and made her work like an animal.

To escape her home, Rebecca married while still young teenager; then she deserted her husband in search of independence and dignity. As a young uneducated woman in Philadelphia, Rebecca became a street woman, only to find that kind of life is empty. Is everything else she had known.