Compassionate and humorous, this is the remarkable story of one Jewish family's sojourn in the deep south of Tennessee in the 1920s. Stella Suberman's father Aaron Bronson, a Jew born into poverty in pre-revolutionary Russia and orphaned from birth, makes his way to the immigrant sweatshops of New York, where he finds a wife, a trade and a dream of creating a better life for his family as a salesman.
In pursuit of this dream they travel by horse and cart to Concordia - one main street, one back, one "feed and seed" and a population of just 5318 (Christian) souls. Here Aaron Bronson establishes a dry-goods store catering to the rural poor, at the same time battling extraordinary odds with wisdom, good humour and courage, and proving himself to be much more than a successful salesman and provider.
With a novelist's sense of scene, suspense and characterization, Suberman turns the clock back to a time when rural America was perhaps more peaceful but no less prejudiced, when educated locals were suspect, and when the Klu Klux Klan threatened all outsiders. In that setting she brings both the townspeople and her family members to vivid life.
