“I heard, I heard.” He shook his head sadly.

“Once, twenty years ago, Yitzchak Chaim and I took a trip to Vilna with other religious Jews. The tour bus drove out to Ponary. We drove down the road that the trucks took to bring the Jews of Vilna from the ghetto. They let us off by the little museum. We looked down the road and there were stone slabs as far as you could see, so many of them, and every one marked a mass grave. As far as you could see,” she repeated, her eyes unseeing as she remembered. She felt her body shiver. “It just went on and on and on.”

He shook his head slowly. “My own family were from Czechoslovakia, the Carpathian Mountains. During the war, the town changed hands and became Hungarian, and then the Nazis took over, and afterward the Russians. Now it’s in the Ukraine. My grandfather was the chief rabbi, as was his father before him. My father was a brilliant young Talmud scholar who was being groomed to take his father’s place. In 1938, he was the father of two small girls and was drafted into the Hungarian slave labor force. It was a miracle that in 1939 they allowed him to come home for Passover. I was born nine months later. My father, blessed be his memory, never lived to see me. The people of the town—my father’s congregation and students—were able to arrange for my bubbee and zaidie, my mother, my sisters, and myself to be smuggled out of the ghetto to a gentile farmer’s house, where we spent the war in hiding. I don’t remember much. But my grandparents didn’t survive the hardships. After the war, we came here, to America, to Boro Park. I was raised as the last remnant of my family’s rabbinic line.”

“A great honor.”

He shrugged. “A great obligation and an even greater burden. To be the only one left…”

They sat there silently, the ghosts of their families twirling around the room, filling the space between them.

“It’s hard for people to understand. Even for the kinderlach. Impossible to explain the heaviness we carry around with us.”

“So many souls depending on us, making demands on us,” he agreed.

“It is the will of the Aibishter.” She sighed. “We do what we can do, no?”

He nodded. “Which means we should try not to be sad if we can help it. You can drown in sadness, like the ocean.”

“Which is why, no matter what, I always have dessert,” she said brightly, smiling.

He laughed, patting his stomach. “I don’t know if I have room, Fruma Esther.”

“Of course you have the room! And I also will make the room,” she promised.

“To something like that, a man cannot say no.”

“Even a very wise man,” she teased him.