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Janet’s background soon had her opening up and feeling at ease. She told him why she had come to New York and they laughed together about her experience in Greenwich Village. She talked about modeling, then about Kansas and her family, and when she mentioned that her father was a doctor Yussel was as impressed as Fayge had been. She told them about the French ancestry on her mother’s side and ended by saying, “And my great-grandfather came from Russia. He was Jewish.” A hush could be heard.
    Narrowing his eyes in disbelief, Yussel asked, “Your zayde, I mean your great-grandfather, was a Jew?”
    “Yes,” she answered.
    Immediately Yussel said, “In that case I have a lovely boy for you.”
    His earnestness almost made Janet laugh. Smiling she answered, “I’d be delighted to meet him.”
    “Nu, so next time you come I’ll introduce you.” …

CHAPTER TWO
    T HE COMPANIONSHIP AND PLEASURE of that evening rushed into Janet’s mind at almost every idle moment during the following weeks. Now her Sundays were complete. She spent the day with Fayge and Mendel and Fridays were a standing invitation. Somehow the young man Yussel had promised never materialized, but Janet was so pleased to be in their company that she never even noticed.
    The only disruption to this pattern came when Janet decided to go home for a week.
    When she told Fayge of her plans, the older woman had brushed aside her apology for missing their usual weekend gathering. “Go and enjoy, Janet. Nothing in the world is more important than a mother and father.”
    True, Janet thought. She had missed them more than she’d ever thought she would. And they might hold a key that would help her understand more of who she was, make her feel more at home with herself in the frighteningly impersonal world she’d entered the day she set foot in New York.
    Janet sat in the library across from her father. “Dad, how much do you know about your grandfather?”
    He looked at her in surprise. “About my grandfather? A great deal. Why do you ask?”
    “I wrote to you about meeting the Kowalskis. Ever since I’ve known them I’ve had a deep curiosity about us. I mean, we’re part Jewish but we seem to have ignored it, and that part of me feels … well, deprived. I’ve heard so much about mom’s side of the family but we’ve talked very little over the years about your origins … I have to know who I am, dad. Tell me all you can.”
    “That would take quite a while, Janet.”
    “Well, it’s little enough time to find out about … my heritage … who I am …”
    James Stevens looked out the window and saw the lovely garden, but his mind went beyond as he began to tell his daughter about things he remembered having been told in his youth …
    His grandfather, Yankel Stevensky, was born in a remote part of Russia. But remote as it was, the men of his village were scholars, and from the time he could speak he had grown up with the idea that he would become a rabbi like his father before him. But the tentacles of Jewish persecution reached out and destroyed both his dreams and his isolated home. When the fires of the pogrom died, Yankel found his father sick and wounded. “You must leave, Yankel,” and so, painful though it was, he left his village, his parents and his roots. Knowing that he would never see them again was the most painful of all….
    When he arrived on the shores of America two years later it was with few worldly possessions. His pockets were bare, his clothing worn and the strain of the ordeals he had suffered was evident in his appearance, but he still had his tefillin, his tallis, Bible and Talmud and he reasoned that he was rather a rich man to have been blessed with the spiritual assets that a man could feed his soul on. Like so many others, he went to the Lower East Side but he discovered it was not the place for him. He couldn’t stand the crowds, the bantering, the hollering. If there was a sky, you couldn’t see it … not