Braided Generations brings to life several generations of two immigrant American clans, the author's and that of her late husband, Harry Gottlieb Jr. As a child, Jean Stern heard her parents' and grandparents' stories of surviving pogroms and struggling to reach America. Not till adulthood, however, did she learn of the family's suicides; in Jewish tradition, their names were never spoken. When a grandnephew asked to know more about his ancestors, this memoir was born, mingling memory and research to enfold those lost ones-and Harry's-back into the family story.

Harry Gottlieb's grandfather, Abraham, was Daniel Burnham's contentious engineer in Devil in the White City; Harry's war-doomed brother was Eleanor Roosevelt's protégé. Jean's childhood was chilled by the Great Depression and anti-Semitism; great musicians, her lawyer father's clients-Horowitz, Milstein-ate at their family table. Prohibition, backstreet abortion, Pearl Harbor: history looms, and on it this tale is woven.