My Mother's Wars Author:Lillian Faderman An acclaimed writer on her mother?s tumultuous life as a Jewish immigrant in 1930s New York and her life-long guilt when the Holocaust claims the family she left behind in Latvia — — Like so many Eastern European Jewish immigrants of the time, Mary Lifton left her family in Latvia in pursuit of a better life in New York. She found work in the g... more »arment district, alongside many others from the Jewish diaspora, struggling to survive in nonunion shops, even becoming a small part of the labor union movement. Alone and subsisting on minimal wages, Mary was swept up by love in a steamy romance with a man who would force her into two back-room abortions and finally father Lillian Faderman, before disappearing from her life. But worse than his romantic betrayals, Moishe kept Mary from doing what she most needed to do: find a way to get her family out of Latvia before Hitler?s Holocaust engulfed and destroyed them. In this carefully crafted and well-documented work of reconstructed memoir, Faderman offers an extraordinary lens onto the anguish of the Jewish Holocaust survivors on our shores.