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followed him down the street as he looked in the gutter and on the sidewalk for the entire twelve blocks back to his place of work.
How did the envelope fall out of his pocket? Did his pocket have a hole in it?
I felt terrible for him that day. My father was visibly shaken by the fact that he’d lost that money. It was one of the few times he expressed emotion of any kind, other than the frustration he regularly showed my mother during their constant bickering.
    My father wasn’t a fearful person; quite the contrary. And yet there was a kind of pathetic quality to him. When he was a young man, not long after he got married, my father came across an ad in the Hungarian newspaper that read dancers wanted. It gave an address in Brooklyn. He took time off work and made the trip to the outer borough to pursue his dream of being in show business. When he got there, they told him to take off his shoes and roll up his trousers and go into an adjacent room. In the room was a vat of grapes, and he was told to step in it. They were making wine, and they needed grape crushers. That was his dancing career. He went there that once, and he never went back.
    Victor Schwartz, my father’s father, came to America around 1917 with his eldest son, Arthur, who joined the merchant marine, went off to sea, and never was heard from again. Grandpa Victor had arranged for his wife and four younger children in Hungary to join him in America once he was established. Soon after he opened a secondhand clothing store in New York, he wrote a letter to his wife, but she didn’t hear from him after that.
    Running out of patience, my grandmother got herself and her children on a boat in steerage to America. When she walked into my grandfather’s store with my father and his three sisters in tow, Victor nearly fell over. He had had no idea his family was coming, and now he had five additional mouths to feed! My grandmother didn’t make a big fuss over her husband’s less-thanenthusiastic reception. She just got on with it. She found a cheap place to live, my grandfather moved in, and they were a family again.
    I have only fleeting memories of my father’s parents. I remember Victor Schwartz as a tough guy. Once, when I was young, I was in my father’s tailor shop when my grandfather lost his temper over something and picked up an iron as if to strike my father with it. I was terrified, but my father just stood calmly and looked at him. My grandmother, a tall, forceful woman who ran my grandfather’s life, stepped in and stopped him. The feeling I remember most from my grandparents is sadness: somewhere along the way they lost their love of life, and they died soon after.
    My father, Manny, was originally going to become an electrician. When the family was still living in Hungary, Victor had arranged to pay an electrician in Budapest to teach my father the trade. After traveling five hours on the family donkey, Victor and Manny arrived in the city, but when they came to the electrician’s shop, it was closed. After staying overnight at a nearby inn, they found the shop still closed the next morning.
    My grandfather wasn’t about to spend any more money on lodging, so he walked a few stores down to a tailor shop. He told the owner how good his son—my father—was with his hands, and he arranged for the tailor to take my father on as an apprentice. The tailor gave my father a room and a sewing machine, and after several months my father became very adept at his trade. He had a real aptitude for it.
    Years later my father told me about a relative of his by the name of Katonah Hershul.
Katonah
in Hungarian means
soldier,
and
Hershul
is
Harry.
Soldier Harry. Katonah Hershul stood over seven feet tall, and he was so strong he could pull a cannon out of the mud. When World War I began, my father wanted to enlist in the Hungarian army. He and some friends had hidden pistols in his bathroom in case the town was attacked, but my grandmother put her foot down