Through a unique combination of biography, memoir, and autobiography, Cherie Smith traces four generations of her immigrant family and, in doing so, charts the very course of Russian-Jewish immigration to the Canadian prairies over the last one hundred years.

Mendel's Children: A Family Chronicle begins in the shtetles of Poland and Latvia in the 1890s and follows an often wild and woolly assortment of relatives as they strive to become Canadians. Meet Great-Grandfather Mendel, the dairyman, who started it all by siring five sons and four daughters; Robert and Sarah, who are conned...