First published 2013
Rose Zimmer rules her Sunnyside neighborhood like a Communist dictator in miniature. The Red Queen browbeats her German Jewish husband Albert and wages ideological war on anyone who crosses her path. Her daughter Miriam inherits Rose's passion but rebels by fleeing to Greenwich Village, where she embraces counterculture and marries Irish folksinger Tommy Gogan. Both women drag the men around them into their political orbits. Rose entangles her nephew Lenny, a chess hustler, and Cicero, son of her black police officer lover. Miriam's son Sergius grows up bewildered by the family legacy. Across decades of American radicalism, from Depression-era parlor communism through McCarthyism to Occupy Wall Street, three generations chase utopian dreams in a country that views their activism with suspicion. The Zimmer women discover that their personal relationships cannot escape their political convictions.
Genres: american-fiction, historical-fiction, 20th-century, 21st-century, activism, family-drama
Vibes: intimate, suspenseful, thought-provoking
Tropes: enemies-to-lovers, found-family
Setting: Greenwich Village, Sunnyside
Period: Depression Era, McCarthyism, Occupy Wall Street
366 pages · Hardcover · Doubleday