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American industrial expansion. They stayed out of the papers for all the right reasons and formed large, hearty families throughout the Midwest that replaced Eastern Europe as their home.
    Stephen and Mary’s blended family moved around every few years,and they either were overlooked by census takers or got hinky when they came around: only in 1920 were they fully polled in the national head count. And Theresa was even more elusive. Indeed, for much of her early life, surmise is all that’s possible. In 1910 a seventeen-year-old Theresa Fetzer was working as a domestic at the home of Meyer E. Loeb of Cleveland. If it was she, it meant that she was a little older than she later claimed. (Perhaps she and/or the Loebs lied about her age in order to acquire or legitimize her working situation.) She didn’t appear in the 1920 census, but she showed up in 1930, by which point the received impression of her life story has begun to gel. There she’s a thirty-two-year-old woman of Czech heritage, naturalized in 1902 and living in Shaker Heights with her husband, Arthur (described as a shoe store merchant), and their two boys, Arthur Jr., age six, and Paul, five. But even then there’s a snag: Arthur, then thirty-six, asserted that he was married for the first time seven years before, in 1923, at age twenty-nine; Theresa, though, revealed that she was first married at age nineteen—thirteen years earlier, in 1917, when she may have been as old as twenty-four.
    Decades later the murkiness of her early life outlived her. Just ask her son: “My mother, on her deathbed, said, ‘Paul, you have to excuse me, I’ve been lying all these years. I’m not eighty-three, I’m eighty-seven.’ And when we took her back to Cleveland to be buried next to my father, her sister was there. And I said, ‘You know, Mother said that she had been lying all these years, and that she wasn’t eighty-three, she was eighty-seven.’ And her sister said, ‘Baloney! She was ninety-three!’”
    T HE WEDDING of this rootless, pretty woman and her owlish, responsible husband would also provide a mystery: unique among their parents and siblings, they weren’t issued a marriage license in Cuyahoga County. Wherever the ceremony was held, it was almost certainly a civil one. Through his life Art belonged to the synagogue known as the Temple in the old Woodland Avenue Jewish enclave of west Cleveland, but his son Paul remembered, “[He] was not a religious man in the sense of going to synagogue or thrusting religion down our throats.” And Theresa would soon leave her native Catholicism forChristian Science—the modern American spiritualist belief popular in the 1920s. She wasn’t so ardent as to deny her sons the benefits of medical care, as strict Christian Scientists would, and she seemed not to mind that her boys didn’t follow her faith. “That didn’t really take on me,” Paul would say of the religion (although he did declare himself a Christian Scientist on college applications, probably reckoning that claiming Jewish heritage would have put him at a disadvantage). *
    The prevailing religion of the household seemed, in fact, to be Americanism. The Newmans set about creating a tidy little family and situating it in increasingly comfortable houses. In January 1924 Arthur Jr. joined the family in the small, neat house on Renrock Road in Cleveland Heights. On January 26 of the following year, in snow and ice so daunting that Art and Theresa dared not venture out, Paul Leonard joined the family. Within two years he was tumbling and stumbling on the floors of the Newmans’ dream house in Shaker Heights—the only childhood home he would ever remember.
    * And he produced an accomplished son in William S. Newman, a classical pianist and music scholar who taught at the University of North Carolina for more than thirty years. (A concert series there still bears his name.) His three-volume
History of the Sonata
, first published in 1963, is considered