Rebecca Schmitt Tung

In a house built over a brothel, Yekel and Sarah struggle for a place in legitimate Jewish society as a pimp and a former prostitute. Everything hinges on marrying off their daughter Rifkele, but Rifkele's secret relationship with Manke, one of the women of the brothel, threatens their carefully laid plans. In Sholem Asch's God of Vengeance, the boundary between the seedy underworld and the respectable world dissolves: when both are built on the sale of female bodies, which is the family home and which the brothel?