Israelis, as members of collective farms in the changed lands of Eastern Europe.” 168 This was a book about Tevye written for Beilke’s children—now that they were ready for it. This book is an attempt to bring our anthropological discipline to the task of preserving something of the form and the content, the texture and the beauty, of the small-town life of Eastern European Jews, as it was lived before World War I, in some places up to World War II, as it still lives in the memories of those who were reared in the shtetl, and in the memories of Jews in other lands, who can remember the stories their grandparents told, the tremendous happy worrying bustle with which the holidays were prepared for, the unrelenting eagerness with which a grandfather tested his grandson for signs of intellectual worth. It lives on, more than a little, in the memories of those [like Margaret Mead herself] who, themselves without any Jewish birthright, nevertheless have at some point warmed their hands by a shtetl fire, or sharpened their wits against the many- faceted polishing stone of talmudic reasoning. 169 Life Is with People begins with a description of the Sabbath Eve and never loses the warm glow of the festive candlelight. Babel’s dark rooms with “Grandmother’s yellow eyes” and Mandelstam’s “suffocating” grandparents with their “black-and-yellow shawls” are transformed into Rembrandt-like golden interiors, at once remote and welcoming, or possibly into flickering reflections of Thanksgiving, “the American pastoral par excellence.” Fittingly enough, one of the book’s two coeditors and, according to Margaret Mead, “the crucial person in our seminar,” was Mark Zborowski, “who combined in one person the living experience of shtetl culture in the Ukraine and Poland and the disciplines of history and anthropology through which to interpret his memories and readings, and the new materials which members of the project collected from interviews and written materials. For him, this book is the realization of a plan cherished for many years.” 170 Like the book itself and most of the book’s readers, Mark Zborowski seemed to stand for the continuity between Tevye’s Sabbath and American Thanksgiving, the shtetl home and academic nostalgia, self-conscious Jewishness and self-conscious Jewishness. He also stood for something else, however. In the 1930s, Zborowski (alias Étienne) had been a Soviet agent provocateur in France, where he had infiltrated the Trotskyite organization;