A Jewish woman in a 19th-century shtetl nearly loses her mind when her six-year-old son is torn from her arms, bound for a twenty-five-year enlistment in the Russian army. She spoils her second son rotten, a foolish, headstrong young man eventually married off to avoid the army but forced to flee to America when he gets a young relative of his in-laws, who is working in their home, pregnant.

In New York during the draft riots of 1863, he gets an Irish girl who loves him pregnant too, but he refuses to marry her, conniving instead to win the heart of the homely only child of a wealthy, social climbing WASP mother and Catholic father. This plain girl follows the rogue. He abandons her as well when he discovers her parents have disowned her.

In a twist of fate, the spurned Irishwoman and the homely girl meet and grow close. In the end, each fashions a wholly new life from the rubble of her past against a grand backdrop of the Civil War. How that happens is the secret of this richly human saga—and it drives the reader forward with one plot revelation after another until it reaches a profoundly unexpected series of climaxes.