Fischkin has a strong reference for the stories of men and women  struggling for something better: her own mother's escape, earlier this  century, from Ukrainian pogroms. Immigrant imagery is both literary and  evergreen - a little boy who dreams of flying, the pretty daughter longing for  big city lights, the wealthy landowner on his white horse - and Fischkin plays  up these tropes. Rightly so as the lives of rural Dominicans are as vivid and  hard as those of Dostoyevski's serfs.