We moved around a lot when I was a kid. My father was a very unsuccessful rabbi. His contracts were never for more than three years, and, even though the positions were in cities considered very undesirable—way out in the hinterlands, far from any large Jewish community—the congregations rarely renewed him.

My father had a very heavy European accent, which, together with the remote air of a scholar, made him a ludicrously unsuitable candidate for the American pulpit. The main point of an American rabbi is the Saturday morning sermon, ideally delivered in that oily style congregations require from their clergy, lubricating the hard little pellet of religion so that it slides in with minimum pain. Learned though my father was—and he is of the high scholarly caliber that is called in his culture a talmid khokhem, literally a “disciple of the wise”—you couldn’t understand a word he said. Or so I learned—very early and very very bitterly—from overhearing the sneers and stifled groans of his congregants.

I was around six years old when I came upon a group of men, a group my father referred to, with a resigned shrug, as the kibitzers, huddled together, out in the hallway during one of his sermons. Every community in which we lived—this one happened to be in Omaha, Nebraska—had its kibitzers, men who came to the synagogue strictly for purposes of socializing. When the socializes were women, they were called, with neither more nor less contempt, yentas.

The Nebraska version of kibitzers were going around the circle, taking turns imitating my father’s accent. It was my primal scene of devastation.

One of the sports spotted me, signaling the others, who immediately all fell into an embarrassed hush, having the decency to look terribly shamefaced before the rabbi’s little daughter.

I count that moment as among the three or four most painful in my life. Its memory burned in me, night after sleepless night, for a very long time. Within the family my father was such a figure of honor, a talmid khokhem, whose every request and requirement were treated with reverent respect. The discovery that outside the family he was only a little man with a comical accent was a contradiction I spent my early life trying to resolve.

The amazing thing is that to me it had always seemed that my father had no accent at all.

The various communities we lived in were always very sorry to see the rebbetzin, my mother, leave. My mother, who is American-born, is also very learned. She used to study Talmud as a girl every Shabbes afternoon with her rabbinical father, just as I did. Sometimes she and my father still learn a page together.

Legend says that when a pious woman dies and goes to heaven she will get to be the footstool of her husband, as he sits in Torah study. My mother is almost a good foot taller than my father. My mother is also beautiful, with features that can accurately be described as chiseled. And whenever my father looks up at my mother, it’s as if he is watching her emerging from the sea, standing poised on a cushion of foam.

My mother always taught in the Sunday schools of the synagogues that employed my father, and she was a rare teacher, managing to get the kids, who were of course seething with resentment at having to go to school on Sundays, almost to like being there. She taught them something, too, trying most to infuse them with a sense of their history. She’s a very charming person, so interested in everyone’s story, always managing to make good friends wherever we went.

My mother was my father’s greatest asset, everyone said so, though not even she could overcome the effect of the accent that sounded like a comedian’s bad joke, and of my father’s impenetrably standoffish manner. Maybe if he were a taller man, or spoke beautiful English, he could have carried off what appeared like such misplaced arrogance, a refugee’s ridiculous insistence on the dignity and honor of his position, as if he were one of God’s chosen ones.

I knew what must have seemed to his congregants to be intransigence and arrogance wasn’t at all personal. My father is personally a very modest and reasonable man. But he was the rabbi—the Rabbi! He was the sole representative of Torah learning among these tragically ignorant Jews. He wasn’t arrogant for himself, but for what he carried with him, the learning and the history, out into those hinterlands.

I know that my mother, and I think this is also true of my brother, Gideon, never got a glimpse of how my father looked to those outside the family, what a caricature he cut out there. But I could never get away from the terrible double-vision of my father. And, because I loved him more than anyone in the world, the double-vision of him was very troubling.

_____________

My father had been a student at the famous Telz Yeshiva in Telsiai, Lithuania. The yeshiva had accepted my father into the highest class—the top shiur—at the unusually young age of fifteen. He was learning there with men who were twice his age. He was giving his own shiurim to men who already had children of their own.

I learned this from my mother, who, if she learned it from my father, must have learned it very indirectly.

Lithuania was the country most renowned by European Jewry for the quality of its scholarship, and Telz was renowned throughout Lithuania. The “way of Telz” placed great emphasis on rationality, on the logical analysis of the text of Talmud. Lithuania was the center of the misnagdim—literally “those who are against,” in this case against the mystical approach to Judaism known as Hasidism. Hasidism had been a grassroots movement, growing up among the Polish uneducated, in part a rebellion against the rabbinical scholarly elite, who equated spirituality with talmudic learning. Hasidim don’t study their way closer to God, but rather sing and dance their way to Him. The scholars of Lithuania responded to Hasidism with little patience, following the implacable position taken by the great Rabbi Elijah Zalman, the “Vilna Gaon,” the legendary talmudic genius of the 18th century, whose influence was felt in the yeshivas of Lithuania even into my father’s day.

My father’s first name is Zalman, and somehow I thought, probably from wishful thinking, through much of my childhood, that the Vilna Gaon had been one of our Lithuanian relatives.

At Telz they didn’t train you to be a pulpit rabbi. I doubt that the concept even existed over there. My father was trained to give shiurim, not sermons. He was trained in the pilpul—the argumentation—of the Talmud, not the politics of the temple. He had ended up in America, at one pulpit after another, because of Hitler and all the rest of it.

He was the only survivor of his family, who had all been living in some Lithuanian town whose name I don’t know, but where my grandfather was the rabbi, my uncles—my father was the youngest of seven sons, born to a second wife and ten years younger than the next eldest—in various positions of authority and honor. The Sonauers had been the leading family in the Jewish life of this town for generations. I don’t know terribly much about it, but I do know that my father was at Telz when the Nazis marched into his town, and that all his family were herded together and locked in the synagogue, which was then torched.

Telsiai was never occupied by the Nazis, but was taken over by the Russians during the war. They confiscated the yeshiva building, and the students were scattered among various Lithuanian towns. A few teachers and students managed to reach the United States, among them, of course, my father.

My father and I look alike to an extraordinary degree, because we both have the same eyes, and these eyes of ours completely dominate our faces. These eyes are huge. They make every expression that crosses our face a sad one. They are deepsocketed, heavy-lidded, and very darkly shadowed, the area around them looking almost bruised. Their color is brown.

On the wall above the sideboard in the dining room of whatever house we were occupying, there was always hung an old silver-framed photograph, maybe six by eight, of my father’s family, taken outside in a garden on a summer’s day. My father had had this picture with him at Telz. There are 42 Sonauers indistinctly captured in the photograph, counting the children sitting cross-legged in front. My father’s six brothers stand in the back, their bewigged wives arranged in front of them. One of my uncles was already a grandfather at the time the picture was taken. His daughter stands near his wife, with the baby in her arms. And in the center sit my grandmother and grandfather, the matriarch and patriarch, she with a rather elaborately coiled wig, he with a raised black skullcap and a long white beard. Nobody, not even the littlest child, smiles. Everyone looks at the camera with an air of studied seriousness.

Whatever gene it is that carries the trait for my father’s and my eyes must be a dominant one. For there they were, in the picture of that old family gathering in Lithuania: pairs and pairs and pairs of them. Almost all of those people who were burned in the synagogue looked exactly like me.

My mother had a word for these eyes. Rabbinical eyes, she called them. And it was as much for these rabbinical eyes as for his reputation as a talmid khokhem that my mother, who was American-born and learned, tall and beautiful, immediately agreed when the young rabbi from Lithuania was suggested to her. She always told me this story when I came complaining to her about how ugly I was, how pathetically puny and sickly looking and different from any child I had ever seen—outside the silver-framed photograph.

“Ugly?” she’d smile at me. “How can you say that, Rochele? With such beautiful eyes. You have the rabbinical eyes of all your sainted ancestors of blessed memory.”

I think my mother really thought that her words would make me love my eyes, love my haunted little face in the way that she did, for all the ghosts that lay behind it. But it doesn’t take a doctorate in child psychology to understand why it was that my mother’s words didn’t help me much; that I walked away from them feeling not only an ugly child but a very bad one as well.

My brother, Gideon, by the way, did not inherit the rabbinical eyes. Gideon was lucky enough to be a child who looked like a child, healthy and American-born.

Of course, I have to admit now—I didn’t realize it back then—that as a consequence of the pathos that people read into my face I tended to get away with a lot more than I otherwise would. I grew up in the 50’s, in the shadow of the Holocaust. I was usually the only Jewish kid in my class—and with such a face I stirred up thoughts and feelings that allowed people to put up with a high degree of aggressive behavior on my part, what the professionals nowadays would call “acting out.”

_____________

My mothers family was also connected with the Telz Yeshiva, only the American branch, which is located in Cleveland, Ohio, to which my father eventually made his way. My mother’s father was one of the teachers there, her mother one of the leading forces behind the creation of the girls’ secondary school. It was a family that very much believed in educating its daughters.

I was born in Cleveland, but we moved to Charleston, South Carolina, my father’s first pulpit position, when I was a few months old. From there we went to Shreveport, Louisiana, where we stayed until I was three and a half, and where Gideon was born. The next place was Savannah, Georgia, which is where my memories start to get distinct, and which we left when I turned six. I started first grade in Omaha, Nebraska, and second grade in Port Jervis, New York. When I was in the fourth grade we moved to Trenton, New Jersey, and we managed to hang on there until I graduated from elementary school.

I remember the anxiety of those first days in new schools, trying to pick out the competition for “smartest kid in the class.” It wasn’t hard. By the time I left to go home for lunch—I think in all those places you got to go home for lunch—I knew whom I’d have to do better than.

In Savannah it was a little girl called Cindy Wallquist, who was the only other kid who started kindergarten knowing how to read. But Cindy was just a minor event, since kindergarten was almost all fun and games. And anyway it was clear that Cindy was mostly just creatively guessing.

Omaha is where it started getting serious, or would have, had the competition been any tougher than little Daisy Dover, who happened to be a minister’s daughter, and the next smartest kid, after the rabbi’s daughter. In math there was just no contest at all.

I can’t even remember who it was in Port Jervis. There was a chunky kid called Ira Fistover, who was reasonably smart.

Trenton is where it began to get a little interesting. Trenton was where Frederick Freudenstein—known, predictably enough, as “Freddy Frankenstein”—had been reigning unchallenged, not just as class genius, but as school genius.

He was a marvel to look at, Freddy was. I couldn’t believe it when I saw him: just the classic picture of the egghead, straight out of a comic book, with his thick glasses, domed forehead, and affectless monotone. When I first saw him I figured his reputation might be based on nothing more substantial than his resemblance to the Professor Peabody character from the Bullwinkle cartoon show. But it wasn’t. I think I had pretty much established that by lunchtime of that first day. Freddy Frankenstein worked away at his own sixth-grade math book while the rest of us were given review work from the third grade.

Tears of humiliation and rage blurred the long columns of tedious addition. There was no way I was going to allow Freddy Frankenstein the uniqueness of supremacy and be grouped with the indistinguishable others.

Freddy made the fourth, fifth, and sixth grades really interesting for me, and we two made it interesting for everyone else. Even the kids in the upper grades learned of our fierce competition. The teachers set up special reading and math groups for us, gave us all sorts of special assignments. We were excused all through fifth and sixth grades from attending science class, and instead embarked on a series of unsupervised experiments in a makeshift laboratory at the back of the room.

Kids envied us. Kids actually admired us for being smart. Perhaps it had to do with the way the teachers reacted to us. They were pretty clever, the way they used Freddy and me.

I liked Freddy, and he liked me. My father called Freddy my khavrusa, my study partner, and told me that a good khavrusa is a gift from God. Freddy once told me that it had been sort of tough for him before I came. Freddy Frankenstein had been a freak before I came. My arrival changed it all around, he said, turned him into a player in what became a school-wide game.

Of course, I could have told him much the same. I really couldn’t believe that this was happening to me, that I was having so much fun, that everybody knew my name, said “Hi” to me when I passed. I remember wanting to say something like that to Freddy, to let him know that he had made a big difference to me also. Maybe I could do it with a pun on goon and gaon, genius.

But even this smelled too much of sentiment. Words of sentiment always end up sticking in my throat. Anyway, he wouldn’t have known what a gaon was.

Freddy and I competed like crazy, especially in that math group. In the sixth grade the teacher simply gave us a tenth-grade geometry book, and told us to go it alone. We did, Freddy and I, each of us intent on getting the answer before the other.

Trenton was the first and only place I was sorry to leave. Being the smartest kid in the class was never the same again.

My brother, Gideon, two and a half years younger than me, developed his own way of coping with all the moves my family made. Gideon had this incredible knack for making friends. It was a kind of genius in him that left me baffled. I always had to wait for him after school, when he’d finally emerge from the building, always in the center of a group of kids. He was very athletic, which certainly helped. And he had my mother’s good looks, too. But it was more than that, though what it was I never could figure out. I just couldn’t see how people hooked in so quickly, so automatically, to the fact that Gideon was genuinely lovable. Even the very first day at each new school I’d see him coming out in the center of an easy, laughing group of brand new best friends.

My brother was smart, good in school, but nothing like me, which left me free to adore him, just like the rest of the world.

I say “my father,” “my mother,” “my brother.” I wonder if they ever say “my daughter,” if Gideon ever says “my sister.” I was disowned by them all two years ago, when I married Luke, who is a Gentile. My father, my mother, and my brother sat shiva for me, as if I were dead.

_____________

The funny thing is that, looking back, I think I probably fell in love with Luke because he reminded me, in some convoluted way, of my father. I had never fallen in love before, hadn’t even come close.

I was at Harvard Law School when I met Luke. I was taking a special enrichment seminar they were offering to first-year law students, on legal writing. It was an innovation at the law school, allowing a student some practical training. We were working on drafting contracts for opposing parties with conflicting interests. Basically the point of the exercise was to write a contract that completely protected your own interests, while leaving you as free as possible to demolish the other guy’s.

Never since the days of Freddy Frankenstein had my talents in the classroom been quite so applauded as in that seminar on legal writing. My contracts, so deviously subtle, became legends. Everybody asked to read them, to study them, including this guy, Luke McClean—Clean Luke, of course, who looked to me like the very picture of a minister’s son.

Clean Luke was having a lot of trouble getting the hang of writing a good contract, and kept asking to study mine. Just to be polite I asked to read one of his. I was as lost in wonder, reading Luke’s contract, as he had been in reading mine.

The thought occurred to me that here was a guy who didn’t have a clue how to protect his own interests while shafting someone else’s. I doubt that this alone made me fall in love with him, but it’s hard for me to say. I was in love with Luke a long time before I knew I was in love with Luke.

Clean Luke was older than the rest of us brash young things at Harvard Law School. (I was the brashest, and the youngest, only twenty.) Unlike the rest of us, so flushed with success, he was at Harvard having already tasted of failure. Law was going to be his second career. His first had been as an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Nebraska. He hadn’t gotten tenure.

I had majored in philosophy as an undergraduate at Harvard, but always with the intention of going to law school. The training in analytic reasoning is a good preparation for the law. Just about everybody in my philosophy classes was there with the same idea.

But Luke told me he had been really serious about philosophy. He was an ethicist. He had written a book on how to derive “ought” from “is.”

Good God, I thought, a philosopher at law school. An ethicist at Harvard—God help him.

I remembered a stupid joke about the Yiddish word farblondjet, which means lost. The definition of farblondjet, went the dumb joke, is a kosher butcher in North Dakota. (Not even my family had ever lived in North Dakota.) Well, now I had a new definition: an ethicist at Harvard Law School.

Luke had taken his denial of tenure very hard, and had tried to hang on in philosophy, accepting a series of terminal positions before finally giving up and applying to law school.

“Hey,” I said, holding in my hand his latest try at a tough contract, as he told me how he had come to be sitting here, in this seminar on legal writing, for which he showed so little aptitude. “Don’t talk of Harvard as if it’s total defeat. Harvard’s not so bad as compensation. You’d be surprised how many people are really quite pleased to get into here.”

“Well, I got in,” said Luke lugubriously. “But I don’t know if I’m going to make it through here. I have serious doubts that I was meant to be a lawyer.”

Boy, so did I. In fact, when I first read one of his contracts I thought that the guy must be stupid. He isn’t. Luke is one of the smartest people I know, in his own special way. It’s just that his own special way doesn’t include any of the strains of intelligence that are likely to show up in the courses you take in law school. He’s a slow, ponderous, deep thinker, who questions the meaning of everything. He really is—God help him—a philosopher. He’s also a creature of unusually generous impulses, which also didn’t help him in law school.

“Well, think of it this way. If you had gotten tenure, you’d still be in Nebraska.”

“That’s exactly where I want to be. I like Nebraska. Hell, I grew up in Omaha.”

“You did? Say, you wouldn’t happen to know a girl named Daisy Dover, would you? A minister’s daughter?”

I was fishing, trying out my hunch that Clean Luke was a minister’s son.

“No,” he had smiled back at me. “Can’t say that I do. We McCleans aren’t really a churchgoing clan.”

Oh well, so much for my hunches. I’m a creature of analytic reasoning, not intuition.

“So who’s this Daisy Dover?”

“Oh, just a little girl I went to first grade with. I went to first grade in Omaha.”

“You did?” Damn but he looked like a minister’s son when he grinned like that. Somewhere down that fallen-away line of McCleans I’d bet you anything there’d once been a clergyman. “First grade, huh? What about the second grade?”

“Second grade was in Port Jervis, New York. Kindergarten, in case you’re getting ready to ask, was in Savannah, Georgia.”

“Army brat?” he had asked me, trying out a hunch of his own that was so off-base it made me laugh out loud. I had to stifle my laughter quickly, as I realized our professor had entered and was staring at the seminar with that slightly injured look with which he always began. Professor Flew might also have been, for all I knew, a man whose arrogance wasn’t of the personal variety, but merely a matter of the dignity of his position. But toy with that arrogance, in any way, and Professor Flew could turn decidedly nasty.

“Rabbinical brat.” I quickly whispered back to Luke.

He looked baffled for a few seconds. Then he whispered, “Your father’s a rabbi?”

I nodded.

“That’s really interesting. You’ve got to tell me all about it.”

I wondered a bit through the seminar as to why I had to tell him all about it. What was so goddamned interesting to Clean Luke of the non-churchgoing McCleans about my father’s being a rabbi?

_____________

We went for coffee after class, and I discovered that Luke was a Jew-freak. A Semitophile, a term I had to coin, as there obviously hadn’t been a very large demand for such a concept.

Luke’s Semitophilia at first made me bristle with hostility. It seemed to me something very near to its virulent opposite. Any fixation on Jews puts me on edge.

I argued with him over coffee that there was just nothing very interesting about Jews. The most interesting thing about Jews was everyone’s totally groundless belief that there was something interesting about Jews.

“I hate to disappoint you, but there’s really no basis to the mystique. If I were you, I’d just stop thinking about it.”

“You’ve got to be kidding,” he had argued with me at first. “You’re going to tell me that there’s nothing interesting about a group that constitutes maybe one-third of 1 percent of the world’s population and has garnered maybe about a sixth of the total Nobel Prizes in science and literature?”

Oh, yuck. How I hated this stuff. Who goes around tabulating the percentage of Jewish Nobel Prize laureates, anyway?

“Hey Luke, I don’t trust your ‘maybe’ statistics. Or better, I don’t trust the inference you seem to be making from them. Have you ever studied probability theory? There are some results there that can seem really amazing. Did you know that the probability of any two people having the same birthday in a group of 23 is as high as a half? You might think there was something mystical and miraculous going on if you kept discovering two people with the same birthdays, that is, unless you understood the mathematics.”

I was trying to end this thing as gracefully as I knew how.

“So you really think there’s nothing different about the Jews? I would think it would make you proud. It would me.”

“Oh, you think so, do you?” My tone took a turn for the worse. “Well, in my opinion your admiration is a very close cousin to a view widely popularized by a certain housepainter from Austria.”

Luke had blushed beet-red at this, looking more than ever like a minister’s son. He sort of tilted back in his chair, as if he were being blown backward by the blast of my insult.

I looked at his scarlet face and immediately repented.

“Boy,” he said, a little shakily. “I just hope I never come up against you in a courtroom. You really are going to make a hell of a prosecuting attorney.”

“Look, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. It was unfounded and unforgivable. It’s just that it’s . . . well, it’s a touchy subject for me.”

“I sort of caught on to that,” he had smiled. What a nice guy! What a genuinely nice guy. Anyone else would have popped me one after an all-out attack like that. I was getting a little old for acting out. What was I trying to do, prove my thesis that the Jew-lover is easily transmuted into the Jew-hater by making Clean Luke hate my guts?

“Listen, Luke, I’m really really sorry. . . .”

“It’s okay. I promise not to admire your heritage anymore. Do I have your permission to admire your legal brilliance?”

“Yeah, sure, go right ahead. No objection raised here to having my brilliance admired.”

“I bet there’s not. And listen, is it okay with you if I go on loving Isaac Bashevis Singer? You’re not going to accuse me of being a neo-Nazi for that, are you?”

It was okay. I deserved that. I’d just take it sweetly, lying down.

“I’m sure it’s just fine for you to like Isaac Bashevis Singer. I’m sure your reasons for doing so are of the purest.”

“You like him too, right?”

This guy had a way of setting up assumptions it was a rare pleasure for me to knock down.

“No, I’m not really one for fiction.”

“Oh.” He seemed disappointed. Just set them up again, sweetie pie, and let me have a go.

“But I have read a few of his stories. I can’t say that they grabbed me.”

“Really?”

“They’re awfully bizarre.”

“Really? To you?”

“Yeah. In fact, I’d say, especially to me. See I told you, we’re not just some mystically bonded tribe dispersed throughout the nations of the world. We’re not the same metaphysical idea being thought in the mind of the same Jewish God. We find each other strange, too. Singer’s world is unintelligible to me. All that supernatural stuff, the spooks and goblins. . . .”

“Dybbuks,” Luke had corrected me.

“Well, I hate to disappoint you again, but where I come from there aren’t any dybbuks, and there aren’t any dopes who believe in them either. My family, which happens to be Orthodox, is as far from believing in dybbuks as in Santa Claus. My family’s faith is a matter of logic.”

_____________

He smiled, maybe as if I were a student in his philosophy class. I suddenly remembered he had been a professor. But I had never been much awed by my professors.

“Is faith ever a matter of logic?” he asked, just like a philosophy professor. “If it’s all a matter of logic, where’s the room for faith?”

I shrugged my shoulders. How could I begin to explain to this guy, who was obviously very taken by the picturesque backwardness of those quaint Jews of Poland, about the way of Telz?

“I think we have a different interpretation of the word ‘faith,’ ” I told him, in such a way as effectively to terminate, or so I hoped, our theological chitchat.

It didn’t. Luke pressed on.

“That’s really interesting to me, what you say. The contrast between your Judaism and Singer’s. You have to explain all this to me.”

Again, I wondered exactly why I had to explain all this to him. But I simply satisfied myself by putting forth a disclaimer, to the effect that it wasn’t my Judaism at all; I had pretty much left all that behind me.

“Oh?” Again Luke seemed disappointed. For a non-churchgoing McClean he sure wanted his Jews to be true to their faith, an observation I would normally have shared with him; but I was still holding my tongue, in the meek posture of penance.

“I saw Singer once in person,” Luke went on. “Right after he got the Nobel Prize. He gave a reading in Omaha.”

“Lucky Omaha,” I muttered.

“Yes, lucky Omaha, though I register your sarcasm, and think it very little becomes you.”

He said this in a way that made me remember again that he had been a professor when I was in junior high, and that he was at least a full ten years older than I was. I tended to forget this because in our present context, by which I mean Harvard Law School, I was his natural superior.

“It was a great experience. Singer was brilliantly funny when it came to answering questions. I remember his saying something like that Yiddish, which logically should be dead, is the perfect language for the Jewish experience, which has always reveled in illogic. Sorry, that’s what the man said. And his accent was so wonderful, so perfect for the story. It was ‘Gimpel the Fool,’ do you know it?”

“I certainly don’t know it. Maybe I read it.”

“I’m going to tell you, though you don’t deserve it, something amazing that happened when Singer came to Omaha. I was very good friends with a girl there, whose parents are pretty prominent in Jewish affairs, though they aren’t at all what you’d call religious.”

How the hell did this guy know what I’d call religious?

“They were just very charitable, charitable people. Very wealthy. Anyway, they were the ones who picked Singer up from the airport, Malise’s father did, and then Singer came to their home for a short time before going on to his reading.”

“Yes?” I, still penitent, encouraged him in the pause.

“Now Malise’s mother, Sandra, is one of the most dynamic, vibrant people I know. She’s chairperson of this organization, fund raiser for that one. Just an absolutely irresistible go-getter. In fact, I happened to meet Malise through her mother, when I was doing some work for the United Jewish Appeal.”

United Jewish Appeal? Man, was this guy farblondjet.

“But Sandra happened to have spent the first three years of her life, if you can believe this, in a closet somewhere in Poland, being hidden from the Nazis. Can you imagine it? She was a little girl who spent the first years of her life in darkness, in silence. And out of that crazy-making beginning, all that vitality and brilliance.

“She didn’t learn to talk until the war was over.

Maybe that’s why she has absolutely no memory at all of the years she spent in the closet.

“Well, when Singer walked into their house, he just looked at Sandra—she’s very attractive, a beautiful redhead—and said ‘You were in the war.’

“Of course, she was astounded. She has no memory of the war at all. And she asked him how he knew.

“ ‘I see it in your eyes,’ he said, ‘I see the war in your eyes.’ ”

And Luke McClean—and his beloved Jewish Nobel Prize laureate, Isaac Bashevis Singer—made me start to cry.

_____________

Luke dropped out of law school after that first disastrous year—I have to say with my encouragement—and he went on to his third career. He became an elementary-school teacher, and he’s managed to hang on to that one. In fact he’s a fantastic sixth-grade teacher, here in New York City, in what they call the inner-city schools, where they sure as hell can use fantastic teachers.

I don’t know how long Luke will be able to keep at it. He puts everything into it, he’s totally involved with those kids, and the burnout rate is known to be high. I’m pretty certain that there’ll be, somewhere down the line, a fourth career. But right now, Luke’s a teacher, heart and soul.

I, of course, kept on at Harvard Law School, made Law Review, and got a job with a prestigious firm on Wall Street with one of those legendary starting salaries, the kind that law-school students tenderly whisper in their sleep. However, I only stayed there long enough to pay off the debts from law school, which had been my plan all along.

I hated it on Wall Street. I hated the kind of law I had to do there. Terminally boring stuff. I hated that Wasp firm, that had done the little Jewish girl with the enormous brains such a great favor in hiring her. Of course, my name now is McClean. I took Luke’s name because my own family had disowned me. I made a point, though, during the interviews at Wasp firms, of mentioning that my father was a rabbi, so that they’d know what they were getting, if they chose to take it. Wasp firms. Jewish firms. Where else but in the law can one get away with such crap?

Okay, so now I’m McClean.

Working there on Wall Street I was like the patriarch Jacob, putting in his time for Leah so that he could eventually marry Rachel. I was putting in my time on Wall Street so that I could eventually make the very uncool, very un-Harvard move of becoming a public defender. My version of marrying Rachel is the job I have now as an appellate attorney for small-time drug dealers and other assorted disenfranchised types.

So Luke’s in the inner-city schools, battling away to try to keep his students from ever ending up in my office which is down near the courthouse, and where, by the way, the burnout rate is also rumored to be somewhat high. And I can understand that, even though I’m in no immediate danger myself. But I’ve been here for almost two years, and I can see how the cases begin to get repetitive, and how after a while you get to not believe any of your clients, for the simple reason that they tend to be liars. Really stupid liars, committing contradictions that they don’t even see as contradictions. Then there’s the other type of criminal who’s very honest about what he’s done because if he did it, it’s got to be okay.

Partly what still keeps me fired up is my belief in the right of appeal. There’s also the occasionally interesting case where the previous judge really did slip up, often in a way so subtle it’s a challenge to present it.

Recently I had a case where the criminal himself was an interesting type. He happened to be a Hasid, convicted for credit-card fraud. We’re still not exactly sure how he and his pals worked it. Guy 1 legitimately had a bunch of credit cards. Guy 2 asks Guy 1 if he’ll help him out with his debts, give him the credit cards for about two weeks, and then report that they’ve been stolen, making up some reason why he hadn’t noticed the theft up until now. It happens that my Hasid was Guy 3, who was the one who actually used the credit cards. I won’t go into the whole story of how he was caught, which features a hooker in Reno, whose services were charged. Guy 2 was never caught.

The charge against my client was unauthorized use of credit cards. My cute little angle in the case was to claim that, since Guy 1 knew that this was a case of fraud, he had authorized their use.

The case I was trying to build got even trickier, since there’s legislative history that actually applies to this little gap through which I was trying to slip my crook. A Senate report had addressed this gap, but a House report had left it unmentioned, which absence, I had argued, showed that the House wanted the gap left in situ .

In short, what I was building was a nifty little house of cards.

This Hasid was very different from my other clients. Well, obviously he was. But what I mean is that he was really quite clever, almost subtle, in a twisted kind of way. He had a lot of things to say about his own defense, which, of course, made my job that much harder, but still made it all that much more interesting, too.

Whenever the Hasid mentioned anything about Judaism I played completely dumb. Just showed him my blank face. But my particular face can’t be made quite blank enough.

“You married a goy, didn’t you, Rachel McClean?”

I stared at him, startled by the question, even more by the contempt with which he spoke it.

“What was your name before?” he persisted.

“Do you want to tell me what this has to do with your case?” I finally snapped back at him. I hate it when I feel that hostile toward a client.

Since he’s a Hasid, his rebbe got into the act as well. I had to speak to this rebbe a couple of times on the phone. I did a good job with him, too. My client had told him I was Jewish, but they obviously figured I was just one of the tragically ignorant. When the rebbe mentioned Purim to me, he felt he had to add the clause, “That’s the Jewish Halloween.”

“Is it?” I answered.

By the way, my angle in the case, cute as it was, didn’t save the Hasid. Some judges I know might even have gone for it. But one of the judges we got (in a federal appeals case one gets three) is a champion bridge player and one of the sharpest analytic minds I’ve ever encountered on the bench. He gave my nifty little house of cards a very brief appreciative smile, then knocked the whole thing over.

My boss thinks this judge, who barely ever betrays anything remotely like a smile, maybe likes me. Last week, when I appeared before him again, he gave me another tiny smile, and said, “Oh, it’s you again.”

I lost that appeal, too.

I win maybe 2 percent of my cases, which isn’t too bad, considering that all my clients are probably guilty as hell.

Ah, creeping cynicism. The harbinger of burnout. But I can’t really afford to burn out at this particular stage of the game.

_____________

People had told me, when I was pregnant, that I was going to feel so conflicted about immediately going back to work, that every woman, no matter how ambitious for her career, goes all mellow right after she’s had a baby. A simple matter of hormones, of that almost mystical mother/baby bonding.

There must have been something wrong with my bonding. My bonding must have sealed not quite right. It all dissolved as soon as I suspected that there was something wrong with the baby.

There is something wrong with the baby, and we don’t know what it is. She’s twelve months old and she doesn’t sit up yet. She doesn’t make eye contact. Her eyes are empty.

We’ve had her in for test after test, ever since she was seven months old, and we began to think there might be something wrong. Up until then we simply thought she was an unusually good baby. So quiet and unfussy. Just the sort of baby two working parents needed.

I hadn’t had amniocentesis, since I was only twenty-seven. But anyway, it’s nothing to do with genes. One doctor suggested that she be tested for Tay-Sachs disease. Stupid, automatic response on his part, since Tay-Sachs is recessive. But it seems that the baby looks like the classic picture of this syndrome, just that sort of vacant lethargy.

But they don’t know what’s wrong with her, and they don’t know what she’ll be like, how dysfunctional she’ll end up being. Right now, they’re only saying that she’s seriously developmentally delayed, a diagnosis that simply summarizes the problem.

I had taken it for granted that the child I carried would be, at the very least, smart. The smartest kid in the class, just like the Mom. I already had devised my theories of education for it.

I remember walking home from one of the first of the visits I paid to one of the first of the doctors, and passing some ubiquitous homeless, with their terribly vacant eyes. They were the sort of losers, deadbeats, criminals whose appeals I end up writing.

There was one woman, slouched up against a building. She was horrible to look at, filthy, ageless. She could’ve been twenty, she could’ve been sixty. She was snarling out curses to an unseen antagonist.

I actually stopped dead on the sidewalk, the baby was sleeping in the carrier strapped to my chest, and I stared down at the heap of rags and misery, until it noticed and started shrieking out profanities at me.

That moment also has to be counted among the three or four worst in my life. It had just hit me, for the first time, that I was now connected to people of this sort in a new way, in a way I can’t bear to be connected.

It’s not in the genes. A perfectly wonderful child had been formed, of this I’m certain, and then something had happened. When?, I keep wondering. During those terribly critical first eighteen weeks? A whiff of something toxic, some moments of oxygen deprivation? Or during the birth? When?

But something did happen, it’s clear, though we don’t yet know what, and maybe never will. And now my life is bound up with the kind of questions I can’t bear to ask.

I hate this baby for that, although I’m too ashamed to tell anyone, by which I suppose I mean Luke, who loves the baby, in a painful, protective way.

A creature was formed, whom her father and I named Gabriella. A creature who will never do anything good, never contribute, never enlighten, never improve the world into which she was born. A creature who will only be a drone and a failure—a joyless obligation to others.

And because there is this Gabriella, because I have brought this Gabriella into the world, I am no longer in control of my life. Nothing before could ever overcome me. I could think my way clear of every obstacle. No matter how bad a case, if there was any angle at all, I’d come up with it.

The woman who takes care of the baby, Mrs. Foote, still insists that’s she’s just the best baby in the world. She constantly talks to her, jangles keys in an effort to stimulate her, insists on taking her out for the four hours of fresh air daily that Dr. Spock deems advisory. Mrs. Foote is a find, a marvel. I marvel over her all the time, how it is that she just refuses to give up on that baby. There’s something so soothing about her persistence in the illusion of normalcy. She’s balm for my nerves.

Mrs. Foote is, of all things, a Jehovah’s Witness. Very occasionally she’ll slip into a proselytizing mode, start quoting from the Bible about the great things that are a-coming. But she doesn’t press. Years of experience have taught her to judge when a person is likely to slam the door in her face. And I am, of course, just the kind of person to slam the door in a Witness’s face.

Mrs. Foote has completely taken over for me, sees that I can’t deal with the baby anymore, can’t even hold it. She and Luke together manage without me.

She mothers me as well, likes “to do” for me, as she puts it.

I used to resent people’s trying “to do” for me. There’s no doubt about the fact that I tend to bring out the mother in people. It’s a matter of my appearance. I still look about twelve years old, even when I dress up like a lawyer. I’m still puny. I’ve always been able to eat anything I want and stay skinny. At college my two roommates, who both had weight problems, would go nuts watching me go through my KitKats and other assorted junk. Every night I’d sit down to my books and my junk food, and listen to my two roommates—who were always nibbling on things like carrots and celery stalks—groan about the unfairness of life.

I was a kid who didn’t look like a kid, and now I’m a grown-up who doesn’t look like a grownup, so people have always been trying “to do” for me, one way or another.

And then there’s the indelible pathos of my face, that reads like a subtext, as the French philosophers say, subverting all my overt aggressiveness.

The baby has my eyes. Her empty eyes are rabbinical eyes. Huge, heavy-lidded, bruised, and sad.

I remember Luke’s leaning over me in the recovery room, as I came out of anaesthesia. I had had a C-section, my frame too narrow for a natural birth. But the obstetrician insists that everything went normally.

“My darling girl,” Luke was saying to me as I opened my eyes. “My darling girl,” he kept repeating to me.

And then his voice went soft with wonder. “Do you know? Our daughter has the rabbinical eyes.”

If only I knew what’s wrong with her, what went wrong. I’d know what to expect. If she’s bad enough, we can just put her in an institution, and then forget that she ever was.

I’d think it was the curse of my family that had somehow done it to us.

“May you, too, have a child that causes you such grief.”

But my parents never said anything of the kind to me. They’re not the type of people who would ever curse, not even a daughter they had disowned. And I’m not the type of person to believe in the efficacy of curses.

_____________

Those places out in the hinterland where we had lived when I was a kid never had a proper Hebrew day school for Gideon and me. There were the synagogue Sunday schools, but these were completely inadequate for the purposes of my family. They were meant for the children of those tragically ignorant Jews.

So both my father and my mother taught the Jewish subjects to Gideon and me. There was no gender-differentiation in what they taught us. My father studied Talmud with me just as hard and as long as with Gideon. I know that Orthodox Jews are rumored to be sexist. Hell, it’s no rumor. One sage wrote that it was better for the sacred books to be burned than be taught to Jewish daughters. And the Vilna Gaon warned, in a letter to his daughters, that women should stay away from the synagogue, since they’re likely to engage there in nothing more uplifting than malicious gossip, which is a fairly serious sin in Judaism.

My family wasn’t at all tainted by this kind of bigotry. My father’s opinion of people in general tended not to be very high. He saw most forms of human activity as varieties of bitul z’man, wastes of time. But I don’t think he thought that there were more yentas than there were kibitzers, or that the yentas were, on the whole, of a more vicious or inferior variety than their brothers in bitul z’man.

I’ve read some of the angry literature that’s been put out recently by Jewish feminists. And truly there seems to be a lot to be angry about. All I can say is that the kind of mindless dismissal of girls that seems to typify certain parts of the Orthodox Jewish world simply wasn’t my experience at all. If anything, my father worked me a little harder than he did Gideon, because I had so much more sitzfleisch, staying power.

I was thrilled when he nodded his head at some line of reasoning I had produced. I heard him once tell my mother that I had a good Gemorah head, the highest praise.

I loved studying alone with my father, getting all of his attention. My father would have made a brilliant lawyer. His Telz background made him so much more suited to the law than to the pulpit. While he was instructing me over a page of Talmud there was no room for the painful double-vision of him to enter.

I could get pretty intense when I studied with my father. I swayed back and forth over the massive open volume, faster and faster.

Sometimes my father would suddenly pull away from the text, sit back in his chair, and turn to me. He would cup my face in his palm, smiling.

“Relax, Rochele, there is no contest here. You don’t have to go so fast. Enjoy the trip a little. Sit back, look out the window. There’s some nice scenery.”

This was the absolutely perfect thing to say to me, because another one of the pleasures that my father and I shared was going for drives together. At least this was a very great pleasure for me. Nothing relaxed me more, as a child, than sitting in the back seat of one of our beat-up second-hand cars—there was a longer series of these than there were homes; cars died on us, one after the other. I remember one of these beauties had a big hole in the floor of the back, through which Gideon and I surreptitiously dropped our candy wrappers, thinking it hysterically funny that we could litter in such an undetectable fashion.

But going for a ride wasn’t my active brother’s idea of the perfect recreation, only mine. I don’t think my father could have enjoyed these drives all that much, either. He was a very poor driver, went too slowly. Other drivers yelled at him. But as long as he kept off the highways, it was okay.

We didn’t speak to each other on our drives alone together. I don’t think my father was really capable of speaking and driving at the same time. He always remained a stranger to the wheel.

But I liked this silence in the car. I’d give myself up totally to the movement. I’d sit back and look out the window, and be completely absorbed in the passing scenes. Savannah, Omaha, Port Jervis. Hell, I even liked driving around Trenton.

Whenever he had to drive me somewhere I always asked him if he could give me an extra ride, just for nothing. And he always did, even though he didn’t like driving, and aimless driving must certainly have counted in his book as a species of bitul z’man.

_____________

I remember when I found out that we would have to be leaving Trenton. I had prayed like crazy that I would be able to go to junior high there, together with Freddy, where we could continue the good fight.

We had remained in Trenton for so long, three years, that I had sort of forgotten the air of anxiety that always entered the house around the time my father’s contract came up for renewal.

Only I sort of hadn’t forgotten. I knew the meaning of those closed discussions between my father and my mother. They’d go into the dining room, and close the sliding doors, and I would gnaw at my already chewed-off fingernails.

“Would you be awfully sad to leave Trenton?” I asked Gideon.

“Yeah, sure,” he said. “Trenton’s nice. I have a lot of good friends here.”

“You’d make other friends,” I told him. “You always do.”

“I guess,” he said, but sadly.

Of course, when my parents announced to Gideon and me that we would be leaving Trenton soon, not yet certain for where (it turned out to be Chattanooga, Tennessee), Gideon and I said that was exciting, it was getting boring in Jersey, it was time to move on. This was, I said, for me the perfect time to leave, since I’d have to be changing schools anyway. And Gideon made up some reason also, to explain why it was the perfect time for him to leave New Jersey, too.

I was filled with rage at those tragically ignorant Jews, who couldn’t see how lucky they were to have a real talmid khokhem for their rabbi.

My father asked me that evening, after dinner, if I would like to go for a ride with him.

We got into the big old Buick that was currently functioning, not too well, as the family means of transportation.

We kept driving, slow but steady, out of Trenton, out onto the highway going north.

I forgot a little of my sadness as I watched the trees, interspersed with the occasional diner or store, go past.

We drove all the way to Princeton, getting off the highway there, and driving around the quiet beautiful town.

We hadn’t spoken, had kept up our usual silence in the car. But as we circled the rim of the campus, we admired aloud the beauty and sheer massiveness of the buildings.

And then my father suddenly said to me:

Maybe you’d like to go to Princeton someday. Maybe this is where you’ll go to college.

“Maybe,” I answered from the back seat.

There was a slight pause, and then he said, so kindly, it broke my heart to hear it, “Maybe you’ll be able to come back to New Jersey some day, Rochele.”

He was trying to comfort me. It broke my heart that he was trying to comfort me.

You don’t need to, Dad, I wanted to say. So I have to leave Trenton. So I have to leave Freddy. So big deal. I can cope with much worse than this.

I struggled, there in the darkness of the back seat, trying to find some safely neutral way of saying this to my father, just as he had found a way to speak to me. My brilliant father! My brilliant father who shouldn’t even have to be here, driving around in the nighttime, trying to apologize to a daughter.

What I don’t understand, what I will never be able to understand, is how a father who once loved a daughter so much could sit shiva for her while she was still alive.

My father doesn’t even know about the baby. I wonder how he would have reacted to such a granddaughter. It was from him that I learned the way of Telz. I was raised on stories of the great geonim. There wasn’t any mention made, in our hagiography, of the figure of the sainted idiot.

Luke has said that we must write to my parents and tell them about the baby. That perhaps it will make a difference.

But if we did write to them, and if it didn’t make a difference, how would I be able to bear it?

_____________

Luke is an amazingly easy touch. When we walk down Broadway together—we live on the Upper West Side, from where he travels uptown to his work, and I travel downtown to mine—and if there’s someone with his hand out within a two-mile radius, he’s bound to sniff out Luke, and come sidling up to him.

They all get to him: the druggies, the little old ladies with their charity boxes and their orphanages in Israel. All the assorted schnorrers of the Upper West Side.

Luke doesn’t refuse to make eye contact and just keep on walking, the way any other sane person in New York does. He stops on the sidewalk, and attends seriously to what the druggie is incoherently mumbling, or the spiel the lady is giving him, while I tug at his sleeve, muttering darkly about people who refuse to learn.

The number of charitable organizations whose lists Luke has managed to get himself onto is simply staggering. Obviously there’s a nefarious practice of interorganizational sharing of names that goes on, so that the solicitations that arrive here are growing out of control, like something cancerous. Any other sane human being would simply trash the unopened letters, not sit there at our kitchen table, night after night, opening them, reading them, sorting them out according to some system of his I don’t even want to know about. Frankly, I’ve been tempted to do some sorting of my own. But I don’t know which of these charities is particularly dear to Luke’s heart.

He makes out his checks in multiples of eighteen, ever since I explained to him why it is that those are the sums so often requested by the Jewish organizations, that the two Hebrew letters designating eighteen are also the letters that spell out the word life. Luke liked that, and even gives to his gun-control and mothers-against-drunk-driving and save-the-sea-turtles organizations in multiples of eighteen.

The pile is particularly high now, since Luke, still the Semitophile, has managed to get himself onto so many Jewish lists; and this is September, the time of the Jewish New Year, when the appeals come thick and fast.

The other night Luke came into the living room, where I sat working on an appeal for a small-time drug dealer, my usual sort of case, this one pretty hopeless, since the guy seems to have gotten a fair trial; and Luke wordlessly handed me one of his appeals.

“What’s this?” I asked him.

“Just read it, Rache,” he answered, and went back into the kitchen.

It came from a girl’s orphanage in Jerusalem, and I had to admit that they had added a new little twist I’d never seen before. There was a little envelope where you could check off the amount of your donation, that was nothing new. But there was also space provided on the envelope for the donor to write his own little special plea to God, as the accompanying letter explained:

We ask you, once again, to remember our innocent little orphan girls at this very special time of the Jewish year. We have provided a place where you can write in your own personal message to the highest one. Your appeal will be carried to the western wall by our little girls, and placed by them there between the sacred stones. You can be certain that your words, placed there by these unfortunate orphans of Israel, who are beloved and blessed in the divine sight, will carry a special power of efficacy in the heavenly realm.

I was slightly shocked by the brazen simple-mindedness of what I read. I don’t believe I had ever seen a metaphysics so unashamedly exposed. My family never would have spoken in terms such as these.

The space provided was not very large. One would have to be succinct. How, precisely, would one do it?

You see, highest one, I have this child. She’s twelve months old and there’s clearly something wrong with her, but so far no one can tell us what.

But then the highest one would know all that, wouldn’t He? Not much briefing is required when addressing omniscience.

Pare it down to a simple petition, then. How about: make it be true that my baby is normal. Only that: normal.

Make it be true? What an awkward choice of words. A verbal clumsiness betraying a logical absurdity.

Make it be true? What could that possibly mean, in the present case? The truth was the truth. The only thing still missing was the knowledge of it. And that would come, sooner or later, without God’s help.

What then could I write? For I was tempted, beyond reason, to write something. Luke would be giving these people his money anyway. What could it hurt if I scribbled in some chosen words, to be placed within the stones by those little orphan girls of Israel?

But I didn’t know how to do it. I had no idea, I hadn’t a clue, how to write a letter to God.

_____________

What would my father, I wondered, have made of this space provided on the envelope? Would he have dismissed it as another bit of backward nonsense, some more wishful thinking disguising itself as religion on the part of the pious ignoramuses?

My father, of course, addresses God three times daily, and my father is a paragon of rationality. So then, there must be some logically consistent way to do it. How?

Does my father petition in his prayers? Plead? Ask for special favors? It’s hard to reconcile such a possibility with what I know of my father.

What precisely does my father do when he prays? What does he think about while he recites the liturgy?

I once walked into the dining room when my father was saying his morning prayers. Normally I wouldn’t have done that, walked into the same room where my father was praying. But I had left my math book there the night before, and I had to get it for school.

My father was wrapped in his prayer shawl, his left arm and forehead bound in phylacteries. His eyes were closed and he didn’t see me. I stood there, waiting for him to notice me, and give me a sign that it was okay to enter the room and get my Schoolbook.

But his eyes remained closed, he didn’t seem to have heard me. And then I saw that there were tears streaming down his face. His cheeks were wet.

This, too, was a possibility hard to reconcile with what I knew of my father. He certainly never cried, never betrayed any sign of emotion, when he prayed before his congregation.

I fled the room, forgetting the book.

I wish I had had the nerve, had not been so fatally shy, to ask my father then, when he loved me so much and would have tried to give me an answer, why he cried when he prayed. I wish I had asked him what it was that he did when he prayed.

I can’t believe that he was pleading, asking for favors, petitioning for change. But it’s possible that what he did, three times daily, was acknowledge his helplessness.

I still have that envelope from the orphanage in Jerusalem. I never gave it back to Luke. It’s not, of course, that I don’t want him to give money to those little orphan girls. I’m just still trying to figure out how to write my letter to God.

_____________

The baby slept through the night from the beginning. How lucky we are, Luke and I had congratulated ourselves. What a considerate baby we have.

Sometimes I get up in the night anyway, and go in to her room. I’ve thought many times of killing her. She’d be easy enough to suffocate.

I’ve read a lot about crib death. I believe I could make it look quite convincing. I believe I would get off.

If I killed Gabriella my life would be mine again. But if I killed Gabriella I wouldn’t deserve to have Luke’s love anymore. And so I almost certainly won’t kill her. But I do wish she would die.

The other night I had a dream that the hospital where Gabriella was born called to tell me a terrible mistake had been perpetrated in the nursery, the night of the birth.

I could hear that the person on the line was very nervous, afraid of a ruinous lawsuit.

What had happened was that the name tags had somehow become mixed up and we had been given the wrong baby. Our real baby, a bouncing bright-eyed little girl, had been taken home by the Freudensteins, who were on their way over now with her.

Poor Freddy, I thought, for a moment. And then a stream of joy went blazing through my whole body.

She isn’t mine! She isn’t mine! Give me my real baby, Freddy Frankenstein!

But then, even in the dream, I remembered that the vacant eyes were my eyes. And so I knew that that damaged person was irreparably mine, and everything went dead again inside me.

My unconscious is very big on denial. I suppose they all are. That’s supposed to be one of their major functions, isn’t it?

I remember the whole series of denial dreams I had after I learned that my family had truly sat shiva for me.

Did I think they wouldn’t? Did I think they loved me so well that they would, for just this once, ignore what their religion told them they were supposed to do?

Yes, I suppose I did. I knew it would be difficult, a very tricky case, but I was certain that I could win it. I had a deep-down belief, always, in my ability to win. To arrive at the new school, pick out the adversary, and go get him. I don’t believe I ever entertained the possibility of being defeated by circumstance. Of course, I could have come away from my childhood, from the picture of my father, such an American failure, with quite a different sense of the odds. But I hadn’t. I was American-born, endowed with an Emersonian sense of self-reliance.

You see, the angle was that Luke loved my eyes. He loved my haunted face, and all the ghosts that came trailing behind it. Hadn’t that been the happy ending my mother had been promising me all along, and that I had kept going back to her to hear, again and again, complaining to her about how ugly I was, just so that I could hear it once more? It was, for me, the archetypal story of romance, its legend. Legend, not just as in myth, but as in the explanatory code attached to a map. I mean the story of how Esther Mykoff, American-born and beautiful, had immediately agreed to meet the young Lithuanian rabbi with the rabbinical eyes.

So what if in my case it was a farblondjet philosopher from Nebraska? Couldn’t my mother, who was always so interested in everyone’s story, be able to see that, so far as the essentials went, the two stories were the same?

I had counted on my mother’s ultimate understanding, and then on her bringing my father around.

Luke had offered to convert, but I, furious at them, hurt beyond all words that they didn’t love me enough, wouldn’t hear of it.

Anyway, no Orthodox rabbi would have converted him just on the basis of his wanting to marry a Jewish girl. They would have put him through an interminable rigmarole. And if it were anything but an Orthodox conversion it would have meant nothing at all to my parents. So nothing at all is what they got.

But I used to dream, night after night, that I opened up the front door of the apartment, and heard the soft murmur of a voice. And I walked down our long hall, thinking: I know that voice, I know that voice. My heart would float higher and higher as I walked down the long hall.

And then I stepped into the living room. And there was my father, drinking a glass of tea with Luke. Both of them turned to me and smiled.

Last night I got up in the middle of the night and went to stand a long time over the baby’s crib. She hadn’t been sleeping when I stepped into the room. She was just lying there with her eyes open.

I finally went back to bed and fell asleep. Sometime, it must have been around dawn, I had a variation on my old dream.

I dreamed I got home from work, and opened the door to hear the murmur of the voice as I walked down the hall. And my heart began to float.

When I stepped into the living room I saw my father together with Luke. They were sitting close beside one another on the couch. My father’s back was to me, but when he turned around I saw he was holding the baby.

He stood, stretching out his arms, holding out my daughter to me.