came to see her. Many years had gone by since they, as young people, had left the family home. We can only guess what her hopes for them may have been back then. What kind of fate had she asked God to grant her uneducated children from a miserable Jewish shtetl? And now here she was, surrounded by prosperous people with all kinds of degrees: engineers, colonels, Ph.D.’s. As far as she was concerned, my mother, for example, was “Madame Minister’s Wife”! She had a lot of grandchildren too. All her life she had been tied to her garden and her cow. My great-great- grandfather, Grandma Gita’s grandfather, had been a rabbi who had written famous Talmudic commentaries called “Elijah’s View.” Her own literacy was limited to reading Hebrew prayers and painstakingly composing letters in her own shtetl dialect. I was there that night. According to the Jewish custom, Grandma was wearing a wig. It was red. I was also surprised that she was eating off special plates that she had brought with her from Poland. She sat proudly at the head of the table in the place of honor. I also remember her full dark skirts that reached the ground. That night must have been the first time in her life that she was truly happy. 73 We do not know how happy Grandma Gita (who could not speak with her grandchildren) truly was or whether she had been truly happy before, but we can be certain that her children, grandchildren, and in-laws sitting around the table were genuinely proud of their accomplishments and fully convinced that Grandma Gita had never been truly happy before. They also knew—beyond all doubt and reflection—that their lives were a part of History and thus incommensurate with the lives of their kinsmen languishing in America and Palestine. Tevye loved all his daughters, of course; Hodl (who was approximately the same age as Rakhil Kaplan, Gita’s oldest daughter and Inna Gaister’s mother) worried about her sisters Beilke and Chava; Hodl’s children felt nothing but pity for their overseas cousins (on those rare occasions when they thought about them at all). When Hope Ulanovskaia and her husband were told in 1931 that their next posting as Soviet secret agents would be to America, and not Romania, as they had supposed, Hope was “terribly upset.” The First Five-Year Plan was underway; people were building socialism, making sacrifices. At least in Romania we would not have had an easy life. We might have had enough to eat, but at any moment we could have been