In this blockbuster bestseller we meet Hannah Blau, the midwife, who fought savage religious prejudice to gain medical training in Moscow’s legendary Imperial College. She fought her own doubts and fears as she plunged into a forbidden love affair and an even more hazard-filled marriage. She fought the awesome odds facing a Jewish immigrant and the bitter hostility of male doctors in turn-of-the-century New York. She fought for her burning dreams and desires. She fought and she won. This sweeping novel follows the courageous and passionate Hannah from the corridors of the Imperial Palace to the Lower East Side, and finally to New York’s Fifth Avenue mansions — recreating a whole world of striving, of love, of lust, of life, death and birth.