If I had to tell you everything that happened, we would both be crying, and it would take more time than either of us is prepared to spend. So I'll tell you part of it, and we'll try together to understand what it all means and what will happen next. I almost said, 'where it will end,' but, in fact, it never ends The road runs on and on, wide and flat, higher and higher, into the clouds. We can look back but not go back; we have to keep moving forward, leaving some behind us, catching up to others. We might walk side by side for a while, but around the next curve, anything can happen.

Time unfolds in gigantic concentric circles. It spirals upward from its origin in the distant, hidden past far below us. It winds around and around in front of us, each cycle bringing us a little higher. How long is each loop? How long might it take to reach the same point again? No one knows, and we can't know. The cycles expand and contract to unseen cues, creating the patterns of history and our experience.

'We'll rest when we're dead,' the old people used to say. The living have to keep going; the need to know what will happen next never leaves us as long as we continue to breathe. When our loved ones die, we leave them behind and continue along that long, long road. If we look back, we can still see them in our mind's eye, but their image becomes less and less clear as the distance grows, and the curve of the road blocks our view, and new scenes rise in front of us.

Still, looking down, back along time, the way we came, we can see the cycles complete themselves, and we reach places our ancestors passed before us on their way around. The substance of our experience is different because it grows from theirs that happened long ago and far below our own arc on the road of time. So much has already passed from our view and is obscured by our position. It will not come into view again until we pass that way again, but our journey may not take us that far.

So, my dear friend, I will tell you some of the things that happened, and you can tell me what you think.

Morris Goldfarb stood on the steps of the Queens County courthouse. He still had 20 minutes or so before his appointed time in court. The summons he had received was in his suit pocket, creased and gritty from having been folded and unfolded many times as he and Beckie pored over, looking for meaning beyond the time and place he was to appear. They had briefly considered whether he should ignore the summons, try to put it out of his mind and wait for consequences that might never arrive.

“This isn’t Poland,” Beckie had said. “No one will come for you.”

Morris thought about this. Neither he nor anyone he knew had ever had a serious encounter with the law in the small town near Warsaw where he had grown up. They had only known the local policeman, who ignored them and would likely have done nothing at all even if someone had been in dire need of help.

“No. We can’t take that chance. We don’t know how things work here and what could happen,” he said finally.

“But people say . . .”

“I know people, too,” Morris cut Beckie off. “They say it’s best to go.”

He had asked his friends about the matter. Some of them had been in New York longer than he had. They spoke English better and had more experience. You had to be brave, they said. In America, it was better to face the problem, admit it existed, and take the consequences. Any consequences would be much more severe if they had to summon him again or, God forbid, come and get him.

So, Morris stood on the steps of the courthouse. The spring air was cool and pleasant and contained no hint of the sweltering summer that would be upon them in a few months. He had walked from the apartment in a matter of minutes without taking in much of his surroundings. On a normal day, Morris would have walked the streets with elation, absorbing every detail of the scene and the people. He paid special attention to their clothes. As a men’s tailor, he had an eye for line and style. When it came to fashion, he prided himself on being able to make anything he saw. So, he would study the clothing people were wearing on the street and that was displayed in the windows of the big stores. Without thinking, he would imagine how such garments were constructed and save that information for later use. It was detail that attracted customers and kept them coming back.

His skill, developed gradually over the long years of sewing and ripping seams when the garment wasn’t right, told him he looked fine for his day in court. He wore a dark suit, an imitation of the outfits you could see in Gimbel’s and Macy’s. It fit him perfectly and had been hand-finished like the bespoke suits at Brooks Brothers. It took time but it was no more expensive to make a good suit, when you knew how, than to produce a rag, Morris thought. It was shameful for a man like him, a man who made a living selling suits, to look less than perfect.

Although he did not make women’s clothing for sale, he made sure Beckie and the girls were always as well dressed as he was. In fact, he enjoyed working on their dresses in the evenings and made sure Beckie’s clothes always looked like more flattering versions of the things the society women wore. Her friends would see her clothes and send their husbands to him – business was business, after all – but, more important, he could be sure he was providing for her better than he had in Poland, when Estelle and Janie were babies. People rarely bought a new suit, and there had been little to eat but the eggs from their own chickens.

It was different now. Everyone was in business. They had money, options, plans, all of which required new clothes, tailored, in a surprisingly large number of cases, by him or others like him who had learned their trade somewhere in Europe. In fact, Morris was starting to feel successful enough to advertise through the clothing his wife, and especially his daughters, wore. How hard was it really to make little girls’ dresses? But they said everything to the adults who saw them. So, every so often, Morris would make the trip into the city, to the garment district where other young men like himself traded in wholesale cloth. You could buy the ends of the bolts for practically nothing. A yard of fabric went a long way in a young girl’s dress, and a patch pocket, a fancy collar, or bright buttons were enough to make them happy. Morris was satisfied his girls were as finely clothed as any child their age, and no one could say about him, ‘The shoemaker’s children go barefoot.’

The day was warming up, and Morris would have liked to sit on a bench in the park for a while watching people pass by. It was almost time for his hearing, though, and he knew he would have to go into courthouse and face what was to come. The massive pillared façade frightened him, and he wondered what he was going to say. Suddenly, he realized that it was not the offense he had committed that was worrying him. It was something entirely different and much more fundamental.

People in the neighborhood here in Queens knew him as Morris Goldfarb, tailor. He was obviously an immigrant, but half the city seemed to have come from someplace else. Morris Goldfarb was now an American citizen; the naturalization papers he carried in his inside pocket said so. However, he was not Morris Goldfarb. He was Moszjek Chibka. In his feelings, he had left that name and everything associated with it behind in Poland when he and Beckie, whose real name was Rywka, decided to emigrate, along with millions of others, and take little Gittl, who was now Janie, and Estera, who had become Estelle, to America. 

“We need a German last name,” Beckie, who was still Rywka at the time, had said. “It won’t be a lie because we speak the language. There are lots of Germans in America.”

“There are lots of Poles, too, Russians, everything,” he told her.

“You want to be a Pole, with a name no one can say?” 

When he didn’t respond right away, she added:

“People will think we’re peasants right off the farm.”

Secretly, Morris had felt Beckie was right. He would not have thought of any of this if she hadn’t brought it up but, once she pointed it out, he realized he agreed with her.

“So, what name do you want?” he had asked.

“What about Gold-something?” 

Morris immediately understood. Beckie’s maiden name had been Zloto, gold. His name was just a name; it couldn’t be translated.

“Gold what?” he asked smiling. He knew she had hit on a successful plan.

“Goldwasser, Goldberg, Goldmann . . . ?”

Eventually, they had chosen Goldfarb and began to work on first names. Beckie read all the newspapers and understood the way people thought. 

There had been no problem getting the necessary documents in the names they had chosen. Recordkeeping had been excellent in Russian-controlled Poland, but as long as you provided all the information requested, the registrar didn’t care who you said you were. So they had come to America as Morris and Rebecca Goldfarb. No one had questioned them or asked about their two little girls, Janie and Estelle. At the time, and for their first few years in New York, it had been a joke everyone they knew could share in, although no one knew what they had done.

Most immigrants from their part of the world changed their name. You could do it legally at the time you took citizenship. Morris knew people who had chosen the name of the street or neighborhood they had first lived in when they arrived in New York. Others had translated their name from German, Polish, or Russian to be more like the Americans. Still others had chosen a name they had heard and liked. People had all kinds of systems for doing this, but, as far as Morris knew, they all had entered America as themselves, in their real persona, and grew into their new identity as their Polish-accented Yiddish rolled into New York English. 

Now Morris wondered whether the authorities had somehow found out he was not who he said he was. Moszjek Chibka had committed no crimes, had nothing even to hide, but perhaps denying one’s essential self was an offense here and the infringement for which he was being summoned was a ruse to get him before a judge. If this was what had happened, he hoped they would tell him how they found out. A word from a nosy neighbor or disgruntled customer from the same part of the world might have been enough. He knew he had to go into the courthouse so he passed quickly through the deeply shaded portico and went through the thick glass doors.

The bailiff, a large man in a uniform like a policeman’s, gave him instructions and told Morris to sit and wait his turn. The courtroom was mostly empty, and Morris had barely seated himself when he heard his name being called. Cautiously, he approached the bench where the judge was sitting as he had been instructed. The judge looked ordinary, even tired, but Morris knew the most commonplace of appearances might go along with a terrible temper. A sign on the desk said the judge’s name was Roth.

Roth was German, Morris knew. The judge might be more understanding than he feared. There were many Germans in New York. Most had arrived long before Morris did and had lost their language. As a sign of respect, Morris had once or twice greeted someone introduced to him in the language that matched the name, only to receive a look of confusion that made him switch quickly to English. He thought the judge’s family must be very proud their son had become a learned man, a man of the law. Morris prepared himself for what might follow.

“We’re here in the matter of the City of New York versus Mr Morris Goldfarb of Ocean Avenue, Queens,” the judge began formally. “Mr Goldfarb you are charged with violating the Sunday trading laws in an incident observed by Officer Michael Shaunnessy on April 13 of this year.” The judge looked at Morris expectantly.

“Yes, Sir?” Morris was aware of people stirring in the room behind him as they waited for their turn before the bench.

“You call the judge ‘Your Honor’,” the bailiff, who was standing by the bench, said mildly.

“Yes, Your Honor?” Morris repeated obediently.

“The particulars of the incident are as follows,” Judge Roth went on. “On Sunday, April 13, at about 8 am, Officer Shaunessy observed you speaking to a man in the doorway of your tailor shop on Ocean Avenue. The man then left the premises carrying a paper wrapped parcel. The officer understood that you had sold the man something and approached your shop to issue a summons as commercial transactions are prohibited in this city on Sunday.”

Morris nodded.“Yes, Your Honor.”

“Do you know Officer Shaunessy?”

Morris glanced over his shoulder to where the policeman was sitting. He seemed bored as if he sat in this courtroom every day of the week, witness to innumerable offenses committed by people like Morris who struggled to understand the rules of the city. Morris had often seen him walking slowly up and down Ocean Avenue, checking the door of any store that happened to be closed and moving along any noisy children blocking the sidewalk.

“Yes, Your Honor.”

“Do you deny the charges against you?”

“No, Your Honor, but . . .”

“Can you tell me what happened?”

Morris hesitated. The judge looked at him kindly. Morris wondered whether he really was going to be allowed to explain.

“Go on,” Judge Roth told him.

“I was in the apartment – we live above the shop – on the morning of April 13 . . .”

“How do you know it was April 13?” Judge Roth asked.

“It was my daughter’s birthday. My wife had been up since dawn baking for a little party for the girls.” Saying the words, Morris was struck by how often events coincided in ways that no one could foresee. “She heard the noise and told me someone was knocking on the door of the shop.”

“Yes?”

“So I went downstairs to see who it was. I thought it might have been an emergency.”

“Was it?” the judge probed.

“In a way. There was a man at the door. He said he needed to buy a suit . . .”

“Was he a customer of yours?”

“No, Your Honor, but I had seen him around the neighborhood.”

“Why did he need to buy a suit?”

“He told me his brother had died in the night. He needed a suit to bury him in.” Morris recalled the distress on the man’s face, his desperation. “He had tears in his eyes!”

“So you sold him the suit?”

“Yes, Your Honor. I make suits to order but I also sell off the rack. Not everyone has the time to wait for a tailor-made suit,” Morris explained. The judge remained impassive.

“Was yours the first shop he came to?” 

“No Your Honor,” Morris replied. “He said he had been to two others before mine, but nobody was there. A lot of tailors, they don’t live above their shop like I do.”

“I see. So you sold him the suit.”

“Yes, Your Honor. I didn’t have the heart not to. He was so upset.” Morris tried to explain. He felt he couldn’t convey the urgency, the pressure, immigrants like himself and his unfortunate customer felt to manage events for which they had no precedent, in a strange country where the ways they knew often failed them, and they had no language to explain.

“Did you know you were breaking the law?” asked Judge Roth.

“Yes, Your Honor,” Morris told him honestly. He knew it would be worse to pretend ignorance. The judge might deem him unfit and take away his license to trade. 

“Did you explain this to the man?”

“Yes, I did, Your Honor. I told him I could get in a lot of trouble for selling to him on a Sunday.”

“What did he say?” the judge asked. There was no anger or malice in his voice.

“He pleaded with me, Your Honor. Finally, I gave in, he was so upset.”

“So, it was a humanitarian gesture?” Judge Roth said. 

Morris thought he could see a hint of a smile on the judge’s face. He was not familiar with the word ‘humanitarian.’ Janie would have known, but he never would have brought her into court to translate for him like many of the immigrants did. How could he expect his girls to grow up and be Americans if he couldn’t show them you had to take responsibility for your own self? He thought hard. The word the judge had used had ‘human’ in it. It occurred to Morris that the judge was asking if he had acted on a human impulse, if he had tried to be a mensch, a man. Perhaps, the judge recognized something in Morris and was giving him a chance.

“Yes, Your Honor, it was a humanitarian thing.” Morris tried to imitate the judge’s pronunciation of the unfamiliar word.

“Very well, then,” said Judge Roth. “I accept that you did not set out to break the law but I am going to issue a warning This is a serious matter, and the law must be obeyed. There will be no fine. Do you understand?”

“Yes, Your Honor. Thank you. Thank you very much.”

Morris waited for a moment. No one said anything. The bailiff was busy with his papers for the next case. Morris turned and walked quickly out of the courtroom. 

Back on the street again, Morris breathed deeply and freely. The men and women he passed were starting to wear their spring clothes and, without thinking, he began to catalog the latest styles. He stopped at a delicatessen to buy some cold cuts for the girls. As he approached his shop and saw Beckie at the window, he suddenly realized that things were not how they had thought they were, and it was now a whole new world.

For perhaps the thirtieth time, Harry rubbed the nickel into the back of his forearm to make it “disappear,” then “reappear” in the fingers of the same hand, as if it had been forced magically into his body to emerge in a more appropriate place. He had been practicing the trick on and off all afternoon, afraid that having mastered it, he would suddenly forget what to do. He wished he had a mirror to judge how the trick would appear to a mark, but there was nothing of the kind in the store, and no one had been in since right after lunch. Irwin and Dorothy were still at school and wouldn’t be home till at least four o’clock. They would probably not stop at the store anyway. Irwin was worried about his application to City College, and Dorothy would want to get right to her homework. Harry’s sister, Anna, would be along soon, though. She stopped at the store every afternoon on her way home from the bakery.

Harry looked around, taking in the rack of comic books that Irwin put in order every Saturday. Customers, in a manner more appropriate for a library than a store, would look over the latest issues of Batman, Captain America, The Phantom, and Green Lantern and disorder the shelves with their rummaging. The counter Harry was leaning on gleamed – he had polished it that morning and wiped it again after the lunchtime rush. The store was located across the street from the Washington Heights post office and was the closest place to get something to eat, a cup of coffee, or an ice cream soda for the neighborhood mailmen. He had checked the cardboard boxes of candy and aligned them on the shelves. The Smarties, bubble gum cigars, candy cigarettes, Red Hots, and licorice laces had to be low down where the kids could reach them. Zagnut, Good & Plenty, Long Boys, Sugar Babies, and Chuckels took up the shelf above that. The Smith Bros cough drops, Walnettos, Necco Wafers, Pearson’s Salted Nut Rolls, and Goetze’s Caramel Creams went on the very top. The candy didn’t appeal to Harry, but it was very popular among his customers, so he kept what they liked in stock. In the morning, he had swept the floor and dusted the two small tables with their matching chairs where people could sit and eat their ice cream. Finally, before lunch, he had looked through the newspaper he kept for the men from the post office to read while eating.

The news didn’t interest Harry, and he didn’t read much. His mother had dutifully enrolled him in the local public school when he was six. When he was 10, he announced he would no longer be going to class. He liked the teachers, who were reasonably nice to him, and being with his friends, older and younger boys, many of whom had heavy Polish or Russian names like him. School itself held little attraction for him though. He had mastered the basics of reading, writing, and arithmetic easily, but the drawing lessons, the only thing he really liked, were very few. They were unsatisfactory as well, in the teacher always insisted he draw simple line animals and buildings, not the scenes that unfolded in his imagination. So, even at 10, tall for his age and blond like a Viking, Harry got a job collecting the trays at a cafeteria and helping the cook with the cleaning and garbage. Perhaps his parents would have liked him to stay in school, at least through the 8th grade when he would have been entitled to a grammar school certificate, but, in America, they had to defer to the wishes of their children whose superior knowledge allowed them to understand how things worked. Anna, who had been 24 at the time and had already taken over much of the management of the household, and Sam, who was 26 and had been working in a garment factory since the day they arrived in America, just laughed and said let Harry do what he wants.

After several years, he had left the cafeteria and worked in the kitchen of one of city’s largest hotels. Once in a while, he would go out to the Paramount Studio in Astoria, hoping for small part in one of the silent movies. He was lucky more often than not; he was handsome and didn’t mind being made up and dressed to suit a part. He had played a number of distinguished roles, like man on a train, man in a bar, and restaurant patron. The extra money was important. It was the nickels, dimes, and quarters – like the coin he had been practicing magic with – that had bought the store and allowed Harry to improve on his father’s lot as a peddler.

He had inherited his father’s ability to talk himself into any place and out of every situation. From his father, he had also learned the importance of good humor, of never taking no for an answer, and never giving up. Where his father had insisted that each housewife buy a book of needles or some ribbon or a pair of scissors, Harry used his talents to urge customers to have another cup of coffee or try an egg cream, guaranteed fresh in chocolate or vanilla. Anna often teased him for having the soul of a salesman, but Harry just replied it was better than having the soul of a rabbi or no soul at all.

Anna was much older than Harry. She had been almost 16 when they came to America. Harry had been an infant, carried in his mother’s arms. Everything he knew about Russia came from Anna or Sam. His parents rarely talked about the old country, proud that he was an American boy like his younger brother, Phil, who had been born in New York. It was Anna, slipping into Yiddish mixed with Polish and Russian, who had explained to Harry about the snow that covered the roofs and dropped off the bare tree branches, about the ice churned to slush in the road by horses’ hoofs, and how a winter coat was the most important thing you could have. To Anna, it had always been winter in Russia, even though Harry knew spring must have come sometime. Besides, there was plenty of snow and slush in New York, although he had not seen a horse in streets of the city for decades now.

Their life in Russia had impressed itself deeply on both Anna and Sam. Neither had married, although Harry as well as their younger brother and sister had and now had children of their own. Sam and Anna lived together in the apartment the whole family had occupied for many years and where their parents had lived, taken care of by their oldest son and daughter, until their deaths. Anna ran the house like their mother had, and there was always a place for any of the children or their children to come to. It was where Harry had gone when he arrived from work at the hotel one day years ago and found his own apartment quarantined because Dorothy had come home sick from school, and the doctor his wife had called said it was scarlet fever. His children spent as much time at Aunt Anna’s and Uncle Sam’s as they did at home, as did their cousins to get away from their own parents. Harry had rarely thought about this situation but he did recall hearing his parents whispering in the kitchen that Anna and Sam had become the victims of America and had sacrificed themselves for the rest of the family. Harry now knew that sacrifice had not been intentional. It was more that the sudden shift from what they had known in Russia and the need to relearn a life in America had shocked them, like the soldiers returning from the World War. They seemed fine but could no longer open themselves to others beyond their small circle of family.

Harry looked at his watch impatiently. Why did no one come into the store? He had a story to tell. Most days were ordinary, and it was hard for Harry to match Anna’s news or even the high school tales of his children. Today, however, he did have something to relate, but no one was around to hear it. Finally, he heard footsteps outside the store and caught a glimpse of Anna in her pink felt hat through the window, despite the glare of afternoon sun. A moment later, she burst in, flung down her purse and a paper bag from the bakery, and dropped onto one of the stools at the counter where Harry was leaning.

“What’s the matter, Little Boy?” she asked before Harry could open his mouth.

“Nothing, nothing at all. Wait till you hear what happened . . .” Harry replied, delighted to have someone to tell his news to at last.

“Me first,” said Anna excitedly. “You’ll never guess what I heard from one of the customers!”

“What?” Harry asked. He was impatient for his turn, but Anna was older and they all deferred to her.

“They’re saying Israel declared independence. There’s now a Jewish state in the Holy Land!”

Harry thought this over. He had seen something in the paper about the British mandate ending, but the news hadn’t interested him. Israel and its problems with the Arabs was as remote to him as Russia and the Cossacks. This was the type of news Irwin followed. He had kept clippings throughout the long years of war and had explained to all of them after dinner one Sunday how the city of Kremenitz, where the whole family down to Harry had been born, and which had changed hands repeatedly in the early part of the century, had ended up in the Russian territory of Ukraine. How does this affect us, Harry had asked his son. Irwin cheerfully admitted that it did not, in fact, affect any of them; it was just to know.

“So, how does this affect us?” Harry now asked Anna.

“I don’t know,” Anna admitted. “But everyone was all excited about it. They said it makes the whole difference to the Jews.”

“I don’t see it.” Harry said. “We’ve got our own problems right here!”

He waited a moment as Anna considered this. When she didn’t speak further, it was his chance.

“You’ll never guess who came in here before.”

“Who?” Anna asked. She was always interested in any gossip or intrigue that involved people they knew or even strangers.

“A couple of Australians!” Harry cried.

“Australians? What’re Australians doing here?”

“That’s what I wanted to know. They said they’re on a tour.”

“A tour of Washington Heights? No one wants to come here,” Anna said with authority.

“I think they meant the City, the whole country. They’re on a tour of America.”

“So what’d they want in here?” Anna asked, oblivious to how her brother might understand the question.

“It was right after lunch. The boys from the PO had just left. They wanted ice cream, and get this . . .” Harry was laughing already, unable to contain his mirth. “They asked for the ice cream in a little paper pail!”

“A little paper pail?!” Anna began to laugh. “You’re making that up!”

“I swear to God I am not! They wanted ice cream in a little paper pail.”

Anna and Harry began to laugh like they had not laughed in a long, long time. There were so many worries every day, both large and small, that they had to think about.

“So, what did you do?” Anna gasped.

“I gave them a Dixie Cup!” Harry said, wiping his eyes.

“Then what happened?” Anna asked. Her face was flushed with laughter. She opened the top button of her light spring coat and fanned her face.

“They said they wanted chocolate!” Harry collapsed on the counter. A little paper pail. It was unbearable and unbelievable and the funniest thing he could recall hearing in his whole life. Everything he knew about Australia – the sun, the desert, the strange animals – flooded into his mind in a rush, but that only seemed to make the elderly aged couple and their search for ice cream in the middle of New York even funnier.

He and Anna laughed for a long time. Their gaiety carried into the street as far as the other stores and the post office, a sign that spring had come, and the long years of war and the troubles of the city had not crushed them yet.

Sidney sat down on one of the chaise lounges around the public swimming pool. He carefully chose his seat to leave an empty chair between himself and a woman dressed in an old fashioned summer dress of a kind rarely seen anymore, except on the very old, and a light sweater that he would have said was completely unnecessary, as it was a very warm day and she was sitting fully in the sun. Lemi heaved his yellow bulk onto the end of the chair and laid his head on Sidney’s lap, sighing as Sidney began to scratch his head. The woman was crocheting very rapidly with a tiny needle and cotton thread in a shade of pale pink that Sidney associated with Easter. On her other side, several of the chaises were occupied by a group of women, who were somewhat younger, and chattered loudly in a mixture of English, Yiddish and German. The crocheting woman rarely looked up from her work, although Sidney saw her smile blankly when the group next to her laughed particularly loud. Every so often, the one nearest to her would turn and offer her a hard candy or a handful of grapes, but each time, the older woman shook her head silently and held up her work as an indication that she could not risk handling anything that might stain the delicate thread.

Sidney watched for several minutes, turning back and forth to keep an eye on Rebecca who was swimming in the pool with some other children. He felt confident that she was safe. The child swam like the proverbial fish and had no fear of water. He felt this was his doing because, when she was younger and they still lived in Manhattan, he would take her to the public pool near their apartment building to escape the oppressive summer heat. The pool was always crowded with noisy, aggressive teenagers who made serious swimming impossible, so he would stand in chest deep water facing the side and hold the child, who was barely more than an infant at the time, so she could splash in the water protected from the boisterous youths playing Marco Polo. He had been hesitant when Frieda, the child’s mother, insisted they should move to the suburbs but he had to admit it was better for the child, and this was a much nicer place for her to swim. Most of the children at the pool were around the same age, and it was all safe and clean.

Sidney turned back to study the women busy with her work. Her fingers moved very quickly and he could see she was making a fancy, openwork glove. The perfect lacey stiches seemed to form by themselves, an impression that could only be conveyed by those who were truly skilled and who had years of practice. He realized the woman had caught his eye because there was something in her manner that reminded him of his own mother. She was old enough to have perhaps been his mother’s younger sister and, while they were not physically similar, there was something about her movements, the way she held her head, that was familiar to him but that was different from the other women sitting nearby who were more similar in demeanor to his own wife. After a moment, he realized that the crocheting woman could not follow the conversation going on around her. The other women’s efforts to include her seemed to make her uncomfortable, even as she longed to be a part of the group. She was clearly older than them, which no doubt contributed to her awkwardness, and also seemed less sophisticated.

He decided to take a chance.

“It’s a lovely day,” he said, in the deeply Slavic dialect of Yiddish his mother used. The words seemed awkward to him. It had been many years since he had spoken in this way. Janie, his mother-in-law Rebecca, and her many relatives spoke a dialect that was closer to German and laughed at his southern pronunciations. In fact, he hated their elitism, born of the fact that they came from a town near Warsaw, and he came from the so-called Little Poland. It was the main reason, Janie’s parents opposed their marriage, although their disapproval vanished quickly enough when he began to make some money.

The woman was deep in her work and seemingly oblivious to what was going on around her. When he spoken, she whipped around to look at him, her eyes wide with joy and recognition.

“Are you . . . a Galitizianer?” she asked.

“Yes,” Sidney replied, the words coming more easily now. “Are you from Tarnopol?” he guessed.

“My late husband,” she said, putting down her crocheting. “I was born in Bukovina.”

Sidney tried to compose a mental picture of the border region of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire. The maps had changed so many times in his lifetime and, although he had taught this material many times to his students in world history, he had trouble imagining the current situation.

“Romania?” His own birthplace was now in the Ukraine. He sometimes wondered whether this made any difference at all to the people who might still be there who could have had some connection to him and even to his little granddaughter, playing carefree in the bright blue swimming pool.

The woman shrugged and smiled.

“Time passes us by,” she said sadly. “Only death stops.”

This had the feel of a proverb he thought he had heard before, perhaps in a dream populated by all the people he had once known who were like this woman.

“I’m Enya Bronshteyn,” she added, speaking more conversationally now.

“Zidney Vajntrub,” he said, giving his own name the Galician pronunciation. Sidney was, of course, an American addition, but no one even remembered anymore that his real name was Zachariah.

“And this fellow?” she asked, indicated the large yellow dog who was now dozing in the sun, his head still in Sidney’s lap. Sidney smiled, recognizing the caution of a rural person and the ancient superstitions of a lost world. “He’s not a Ruggenvulf, is he?”

It took Sidney a moment to recall what this term meant and a further moment to determine an appropriately reassuring answer. The woman feared Lemi, with his curious fur and the pale eyes of a wolf, might be some sort of supernatural creature, a werewolf perhaps.

“Lemi? No, he is a real dog. I saw his mother and father.”

“A loyal companion then.” She smiled shyly now, ashamed of her fear. Her movements made Sidney think of a young girl, not this elderly woman who was so out of place with her handwork and old fashioned clothing. People do not lose their essential self, he thought, and the old really do die young.

“Is that your grandson?” he asked, indicating a boy a little older than his granddaughter wearing green swimming trunks.

“My great grandson. His name is Theodore.”

“A fine boy. His parents . . .?”

“His mother is my granddaughter, Nina. The father, he’s a professional man, an accountant.”

“That’s my granddaughter, Rebecca,” Sidney told her, pointing to the little girl who was now sitting on the edge of the pool talking intently to Theodore who was in the water. 

“What about your own children.”

“My daughter, her husband, they’re both gone now. So it’s just us now, me, Nina and her husband, the boy.”

Sidney nodded. It was a sad story, but many of the old people he knew were lost in time and space, displaced, like Enya Bronshteyn, figures from a place that no longer existed. He felt that she must have been among the small number of old people who rode out the war, the turmoil, and reorganization and were finally located by anxious relatives to be reunited in American suburbs with descendants like little Theodore who were strangers to them. He was surprised to find that this was not the case.

“How long have you been here?” Sidney asked.

“Decades. I don’t remember exactly. Since before the war. We were living in Zalishchyky, and one day my daughter and her husband said, we should go to America. I said, what for? But they insisted it was the right thing to do. My husband was already dead by then, so what could I do. I only had the one daughter.”

Sidney nodded in agreement. He also had only the one daughter, Frieda. It was only natural for the balance of nature to turn one day and the parents to follow the child’s lead.

“We lived in Queens for years,” she went on. “After my daughter died, I was alone in the apartment. Nina insisted I come to them.”

“But surely it’s better to be with your granddaughter, with Theodore.”

She shrugged again, this time in resignation.

“You’re a young man. Me, I’ve lived too long.” Sidney almost laughed. The young view all old people the same. In reality, the difference twenty years makes at 20 or 30 is the same at 60 or 70.

“But aren’t they kind to you?”

“Too kind. Every morning, before she goes to work, Nina says, ‘I’m sorry, Grandma, I have to go.’ I’m her Bubbe, but she calls me ‘Grandma.’” Enya looked at Sidney, seeking confirmation that he understood. “They don’t let me do a thing,” she went on. “I try to dust, do some housework, they take the rag out of my hand. They have a girl who comes in to do that. I try to cook, but they don’t want to eat that kind of food. Nina, the husband, the boy, they’re all American. Theodore eats noodles with tomato sauce out of a can and fish sticks!” She spoke the final words in heavily accented English as if it were a curse.

“So what do you do, to fill the day?”

“I crochet. I make gloves. The Catholic ladies, they wear them to church. The Greek Catholics, too.”

Sidney had not heard that term for many years. The new was not always comparable to the old, and change frequently did not satisfy the way what was customary did. He had rarely thought about such things over the years, but, since he had retired, the past seemed more immediate and Die Pintele Yid, the Little Jew inside, spoke to him more often.

“Nina takes the orders for me, on the telephone,” Enya was saying. “I make what they want, and Nina calls them to tell them. She deals with the money for me. I have a bank account,” she added, the way Sidney might have said he had a space ship.

“Do you spend a lot of time with Theodore?” he asked.

“Not so much. He’s in school. When he’s home, I do what his mother says.” She switched to English. “He vant zanvich, I make. He vant glas milch. Ve go to park, to pool.” She changed to Yiddish again. “He’s a good boy.”

Sidney thought about all this and considered that the ability to change yourself was a blessing. He, Janie, her parents, even his own parents who had been very much like Enya Bronshteyn, had recreated themselves in the image of the Americans around them. He stroked Lemi’s head. The dog was now fully asleep and didn’t stir at his touch. Perhaps it didn’t matter, and it was better to let your former self go.

At that moment, Theodore ran up to Sidney and Enya, spraying her chair and workbag with pool water. Rebecca followed and stood dripping at the foot of Sidney’s chaise.

“Can we get ice cream?” the boy asked hopefully.

“Alvays die ice crim,” Enya said laughing. She began to feel in the bottom of her bag and finally pulled out an extremely ancient change purse.

“Aren’t you two cold?” Sidney asked, directing the question to Rebecca.

“We’re hot!” she said defiantly.

Sidney laughed as well and made a show of reaching into his pockets. He carefully took out his pipe, his glasses which he always carried in case he wanted to read something, and finally two quarters. Before Enya could find some coins, he handed one to each child.

“That’s a lot of money,” she said to him in Yiddish so the children would not understand.

“They’ll only be young once,” he told her. “Can you go to the snack bar yourselves?” he asked, looking at Theodore who was the older of the two.

“Yes. We’ll be careful,” the boy told him, anticipating what he knew the next question would be.

“OK then. Go together.”

Sidney watched them go. They ran, the usual form of movement for the young, but carefully avoided the edge of the pool and the belongings of the other old people watching their grandchildren in the pool. Enya had returned to her work and was crocheting at a rapid pace.

“It really is a lovely day,” she said with the embarrassment that comes from having talked for too long and said too much. “Perhaps next time you’ll introduce me to your wife.”

“Of course,” said Sidney. “She’ll like that,” he went on, knowing that Janie would not like it at all. “She will probably order some gloves.” That much was true.

“Of course,” Enya said. “Any color she likes.”

When the children returned, both old people stood to leave.

“Come, Theodore. Mama vill be vorry.” Enya held out her hand to the little boy.

“Mom, knows where we are, Grandma,” he said, taking her hand as if he alone were responsible for the old woman.

“Can I hold Lemi’s leash, Poppy?” Rebecca asked.

“Yes, but hold him tight. You know the little children are afraid of him.”

“Bye, Becky,” Theodore called over his shoulder.

“Bye, Teddy. See you!”

As they walked slowly home, the child’s eyes alert for any misbehavior on the part of the dog, Sidney wondered if Rebecca and Theodore might meet one day 60 years from now, when the world had changed again, and feel the loss he and Enya did today. He hoped the ease and confidence and certainty they had today would last their life time, even if they hadn’t for him.