In an effort to escape the blinding poverty in which they lived, the Seid family moved to Cleveland, Ohio in 1916, but her parents were unable to find the prosperity they sought.
Seid spent five years working for the WPA, writing, editing and doing historical research on areas of interest in Ohio.
To support herself and her family, Seid accepted a position in publicity with the American Red Cross in 1941, where she remained until after World War II.
The book dealt with the problems facing second-generation Russian Jewish immigrants, including a disdain for tradition and a shame over family.
Sinclair is much more successful when she presents female characters and when she attempts to show the integration of international, emotional, spiritual and religious features of the individual life.
The Changelings presents the problems of a changing environment (the influx of blacks into a neighborhood of Eastern European immigrants) on the children of the community.
Her novels Sing at My Wake and Anna Teller portray the pain of youth, the complexity of the parent-child relationship and the rarity of sexual fulfillment in a woman's life.
The fictional Anna Hurvitz Teller is, on the other hand, the prototypical strong immigrant woman who overcomes this unhappiness of the 20th-century American female by sheer determination.
Although Sinclair often is included in discussions of American-Jewish novelists, her interest in the painful psychology of the 20th-century human transcends the boundaries such a category suggests.
Emil feels unidentified with Jewish peoplehood, but joining a temple does not assuage his pain; acceptance of his mother as a strong, but human and loving woman does.