Episode 3

By Jonathan Lethem

A Twentieth Century American epic by prize-winning novelist Jonathan Lethem, applying his sharp, funny and perfectly crafted prose to an alternative history of America which puts a woman at its heart - a Jewish, Communist woman, a single mother, a second generation immigrant deeply involved in the civil rights movement.

In 1955 Rose Zimmer is kicked out of the American Communist party for her affair with a black policeman. Her ire and her radicalism, her incendiary disappointment in the Twentieth Century, prove inescapable for the generations that come after her - her idealistic hippy daughter Miriam, black stepson Cicero and her lost grandson Sergius.

Episode 3: Miriam sneaks a boy home and ignites a life changing row. Single mother Rose and teenage Miriam are caught in a dramatically escalating argument with consequences that spool out into both of their lives.

Read by Laurel Lefkow
Abridged by Elizabeth Reeder
Produced by Allegra McIlroy.