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By Root 1080 0

Street, in one or two pictures in my father's photograph album, looks like an unfinished sketch for a street. Square stone buildings with iron shutters and iron grilles on the verandas. Here and there on the windowsills pale geraniums bloom in pots between the sealed jars of cu-cumbers or peppers pickling in garlic and dill. In the center between the buildings there is no road yet but only a temporary building site, a dusty track scattered with building materials, gravel, piles of half-finished stones, sacks of cement, metal drums, floor tiles, heaps of sand, coils of wire for fencing, a mound of wooden scaffolding. Some spiny prosopis still sprout among the mess of building materials, covered with whitish dust. Stonemasons sit on the ground in the middle of the track, barefoot, naked from the waist up, with cloths draped around their heads, in baggy trousers, the sound of their hammers striking the chisels and cutting grooves in the stones filling the air with the drumbeats of some strange, stubborn atonal music. Hoarse shouts ring out from time to time from the end of the street, "Ba-rud! Ba-rud" (explosion), followed by the thunderous haul of shattered stones.

In another, formal picture, as though taken before a party, there stands right in the center of Amos Street, in the midst of all this commotion, a rectangular black hearse-like automobile. A taxi or a hired car? Impossible to tell from the photo. It is a gleaming, polished car of the 1920s, with thin tires like a motorcycle, and metal spokes, and a strip of chrome running along the edge of the hood. The hood has louvers on the side to let in the air, and on the tip of its nose the shiny chrome radiator cap protrudes like a pimple. In front, two round headlights hang from a sort of silvery bar, and the headlights too are silvery and gleam in the sun.

By the side of this magnificent automobile the camera has caught Alexander Klausner, General Agent, resplendent in a cream-colored tropical suit and a tie, with a panama hat on his head, looking rather like Errol Flynn in a film about European aristocrats in equatorial Africa or in Burma. At his side, stronger, taller, and wider than he, stands the imposing figure of his elegant wife Shlomit, his cousin and mistress, a grande dame, stately as a battleship, in a short-sleeved summer frock, wearing a necklace and a splendid fedora hat with muslin veil set at a precise angle on her perfectly coiffed hairdo, and clutching a parasol. Their son Lonia, Lionichka, is standing at their side like a nervous bridegroom on his wedding day. He looks faintly comical, with his mouth slightly open, his round spectacles slipping down his nose, his shoulders drooping, confined, and almost mummified in a tight suit, and a stiff black hat that looks as though it has been forced onto his head: it comes halfway down his forehead like an upturned pudding basin, and gives the impression that only his overlarge ears prevent it from slipping down to his chin and swallowing up the rest of his head.

What was the solemn event for which the three of them had dressed up in their finery and ordered a special limousine? There is no way of knowing. The date, to judge by other photographs on the same page of the album, is 1934, the year after they arrived in the country, when they all still lived in the Zarchis' apartment on Amos Street. I can make out the number of the automobile without difficulty, M 1651. My father would have been twenty-four, but in the picture he looks like a fifteen-year-old disguised as a respectable middle-aged gentleman.

When they first arrived from Vilna, all three Klausners lived for a year or so in the two-and-a-half-room apartment in Amos Street. Then Grandma and Grandpa found themselves a little place to rent, with a single room plus a tiny room that served as Grandpa's "den," his safe haven from his wife's fits of rage and from the hygienic scourge of her war on germs. The new apartment was the one in Prague Lane, between Isaiah Street and Chancellor Street, now renamed Strauss Street.

The front room in the old