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But Grandma Shlomit, so the family tradition has it, never entertained for a moment the thought of giving him up. She immediately took hold of him by the earlobe and held fast, she did not relax her grip day or night until they emerged from the premises of the New York rabbi who had married them to each other according to the laws of Moses and of Israel. ("By the ear," my family would say in a hilarious whisper, "she pulled him by the ear all the way, and she didn't let go till they were well and truly hitched." And sometimes they said: "Till they were hitched? Naah. She never let go of him. Ever. Not till her dying day, and maybe even a little bit longer than that, she held fast to his ear, and sometimes gave him a little tug.")

And then, a great puzzle followed. Within a year or two this odd couple had paid for another passage—or perhaps their parents helped them again—and embarked on another steamship, and without a backward glance they returned to Odessa.

It was utterly unheard of: some two million Jews migrated from east to west and settled in America in fewer than two score years between 1880 and 1917, and for all of them it was a one-way trip, except for my grandparents, who made the return journey. It must be supposed that they were the only passengers, so that there was no one for my passionate grandfather to fall in love with, and his ear was safe all the way back to Odessa.

Why did they return?

I was never able to extract a clear answer from them.

"Grandma, what was wrong with America?"

"There was nothing wrong. Only it was so crowded."

"Crowded? In America?"

"Too many people in such a small country."

"Who decided to go back, Grandpa? You or Grandma?"

"Nu, shto, what do you mean? What sort of a question is that?"

"And why did you decide to leave? What didn't you like about it?"

"What didn't we like? What didn't we like? We didn't like anything about it. Nu, well. It was full of horses and Red Indians."

"Red Indians?"

"Red Indians."

More than this I was never able to get out of him.

Here is a translation of a poem called "Winter" that Grandpa wrote in Russian, as usual:

Springtime has fled, now it's winter instead,

The storm winds do rage and the skies have turned black.

Joy and gladness depart from my gloom-laden heart,

I wanted to weep but my tears are held back.

My soul feels weak and my spirit is bleak,

My heart is as dark as the heavens above.

My days have grown old, I'll no longer behold

The joys of the spring and the pleasures of love.

In 1972, when I first went to New York, I looked for and found a woman who looked like a Native American; she was standing, as I recall, on the corner of Lexington and Fifty-third Street handing out leaflets. She was neither young nor old, had wide cheekbones, and she wore an old man's overcoat and a kind of shawl against the biting cold wind. She held out a leaflet and smiled; I took it and said thank you. "Love awaits you," it promised, under the address of a singles bar. "Don't waste another minute. Come now."

In a picture taken back in Odessa in 1913 or 1914 my grandfather is wearing a bowtie, a gray hat with a shiny silk band, and a three-piece suit whose open jacket reveals, running across the buttoned-up vest, a fine line of silver apparently connected to a pocket watch. The dark silk bow stands out against his brilliant white shirt, there is a high shine on his black shoes, his smart cane hangs, as usual, from his arm, just below the elbow; he is holding hands with a six-year-old boy on his right and a pretty four-year-old girl on his left. The boy has a round face, and a carefully combed lock of hair peeps endearingly from under his cap and cuts a straight line across his forehead. He is wearing a magnificent double-breasted coat with two rows of huge white buttons. From the bottom of the coat sprouts a pair of short trousers beneath which peeps a narrow band of white knee that is immediately swallowed up in long white socks presumably held up by garters.

The little