Feisty Sasha Saunders, a rabbi's daughter, leaves her family's rural Polish shtetl for the excitement of prewar Warsaw. There she joins a troupe of brilliant young Yiddish actors intent on creating new theater from old experience. Out of an audition gone wrong Sasha becomes a star, adored and celebrated, and a devotee of Warsaw's decadent glamour.

Though beautiful and flamboyant, Sasha is no fool. In fact, her twist-and-turn-filled life leaves her something of an armchair philosopher, always wondering, How did I get here from there? You can never be certain, Sasha knows, because there is such a thing as mazel. Mazel, as Sasha expounds it, is the great confounder of order and predictability. Mazel is the imp of metaphysics.

Brimming with stories-within-stories, Sasha's life covers almost eighty years and brings her from the Old World to the New. Mazel is the legacy she passes down to her daughter, Chloe, a freethinker of the sixties, and to her granddaughter, Phoebe, a mathematician of the nineties. This enormously delicious and appealing multigenerational novel is as rich, dense, and layered as a piece of Sacher torte.