The three options did not just share some important features—they also shared the same set of people. Tevye’s crooked son-in-law was equally willing to ship the old man to America or to Palestine. Tsaytl could have joined any one of her three surviving sisters in their new homes. And then there were the four brothers of Anatoly Rybakov’s Uncle Misha (the “kind, devil-may-care, courageous, just, and selfless” Red Cavalryman). One was a “speculator, greedy and cunning.” Another, “a simple, calm, and delicate man,” worked as a truck driver in America. The third, “a visionary and a daydreamer,” left for Palestine but came back after his wife’s death. And the fourth became a Soviet prosecutor and spent years renouncing his father the shopkeeper (as well as denouncing and sentencing many more people to whom he was not related). Some of them probably could have exchanged places. Ester Markish’s father left Baku for Palestine but then liked what he heard about NEP (the New Economic Policy) and came back to Baku. Tsafrira Meromskaia’s Uncle Sima experimented with pioneer life as a settler in Eretz Israel before settling on pioneer life as a construction worker in western Siberia. Feliks Roziner’s father was a Zionist in Odessa and a Communist in Palestine before becoming a Communist in the Soviet Union and eventually a Zionist in Israel. My own grandmother went first to Argentina, then to “Stalin’s Zion” in Birobidzhan, and finally to Moscow. One of her brothers stayed in Belorussia; another stayed behind in Argentina (before moving to Israel), a third became a businessman in Warsaw (before being arrested in the Soviet Union), and the fourth became a Mapai and Histadrut official in Israel. 6 Whatever the similarities or substitutions, however, there is little doubt that each of these three options took Jews as far as they could go in pursuing one particular facet of modern life—or that all three represented radical alternatives to the status of an overachieving minority in underachieving European nation- states. The United States was the least radical—the only nonrevolutionary—option. It was the place “where all the hard-luck cases went” (as Tevye put it); where nostalgia for the shtetl was not an absolute taboo; where Yiddish was spoken in city streets; where Tevye and his “kissing cousin” Menachem Mendl could ply their old trades; where Jews went as whole families (and where succeeding generations of young Jews would keep reenacting the great patricidal rebellion they had missed out on). America was a Utopia where anyone could become a Rothschild or a Brodsky (or perhaps an Einstein), but it was a familiar Utopia, an Odessa minus the tsar and the Cossacks. According to Bromberg, “This enormous, million-strong ghetto of Brooklyn, the Bronx, and the East Side—