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exemplar of Jewish aristocratic bearing. His beautiful, delicate hands hesitated before turning the page he had just studied, as though he were sorry to leave a passage still so full of immeasurable wisdom. He had sought out the quietest corner of the deck, apparently unwilling to let even his whispers reach the ears of an alien, hostile world, not, God forbid, because he feared that world but because of its undying hatred of Jews. “The whole world is our enemy,” he declared, when I buttonholed him for his reaction to the Hitler-news. The Nazi bloodbath was no special concern of his. With fine Jewish humor he explained that such events were family squabbles, as at a wedding to which we Jews were not invited either by the groom’s side or the bride’s. The moral of the Hitler purge was that they all hated us. How this followed from the massacre of Nazis slaying one another he didn’t say, but he assured me that all the enemies of Israel could be made to disappear by studying a sacred Jewish text.
    The man looked to be about seventy, on the cusp of the Bible’s allotted span of years. He radiated a serenity that could not be bought for a king’s treasure. The rabbinic dictum “The day is short and the task great” didn’t seem to concern him. In leisurely fashion he studied the sacred texts for the sheer intellectual pleasure this gave him, engaging in the holy activity for its own sake. He considered the reward of the world to come beside the point, and besides, the world to come was still far off. It was refreshing to find an American Jew who fit Lao Tse’s aphoristic descriptions of wisdom, in sharp contrast to the more general type of American Jew, who didn’t question the average life span cited in actuarial tables positing that one would drop dead like an exhausted horse in one’s fifties, and who consequently thought it necessary to speed things up, discharge one’s responsibilities with dispatch, and gulp down the bit of pleasure that life affords. This type did not believe in getting too wrapped up in children, either: What was the point of forming close relationships with them, if you would be a father for only—twenty years?
    This slipper-clad Jew emitted the same aura of Sabbath calm that descended over our house like a secret when Mother and Father would shut their bedroom door for a nap following the Sabbath-afternoon meal, a stillness that would prevail until darkness fell and the time came for Father to take down the iron bolts and bars from his shop. The smell of the rusted metal, the clanking of the frozen keys, and the appearance of the first customer of the new week—these were the signals that the God of Abraham had rekindled all the lamps, marking the end of the holy Sabbath and the start of another care-filled week. Suddenly, this gentle Jew studying his holy texts on the ship’s deck seemed a bridge linking my first seventeen, eighteen years at home with the present journey back to it—a return voyage to see my dying mother. “Her ears are as yellow as wax,” my aunt had written. “Pack your things and come immediately, and may God help us all and bring you here in time to find her still alive.”
    The ship seemed to be carrying me back to childhood, as though it were sailing backward in time. The two decades I had passed in America crumbled to dust between my fingers. Suddenly, all that mattered were the first years of my life, now straining to link up with the home that was awaiting me, like the two parts of a toy that need to be joined. I was awash in memories. Hitherto I had strongly resisted the temptation to submit my early years to the scalpel. I thought I should wait another twenty years and postpone any autobiographical exercise until I was sixty, by which time the fortunes of Yiddish letters would probably have sunk so low as to preclude any interest in serious literature and left nothing for a writer but to become a purveyor of old gossip, satisfying people’s curiosity