THE NIGHT before her wedding, Naomi’s great-great-grandmother Leah had a dream. Leah dreamt that her family had written to her grandmother to tell her about the wedding, and her grandmother, despite the horror and length and expense and absurdity of the journey—first the trip to the port, which could take weeks in itself, and then in steerage class to New York Harbor—had miraculously decided to come. To surprise them, in effect, since sending a letter to warn them would have taken too long.

So Leah’s grandmother made the journey in the hull of a ship, handling her nausea like royalty in front of the other vomiting immigrants, and sailed into New York. The immigration officers at Ellis Island couldn’t believe that someone had come to America all the way from a town south of Kiev just to attend her granddaughter’s wedding, but in the dream Leah’s grandmother convinced them, and found her way to Manhattan and finally to Orchard Street, where she could hardly believe what she saw. Giant buildings rising out of the street, as huge as palaces in her eyes, row upon row of them, an endless canyon carved from cliffs of brick and iron. She found 99 Orchard Street and opened the door. Then she climbed up the stairs, glowing orange from the new gaslights, to Leah’s apartment, bewildered by the building’s many stories, the identical doors that appeared at every turn. She lifted her tiny wrinkled hand and banged on Leah’s door. No one answered. She banged again. No response.

The reason no one answered, of course, was that they were all at work. But “at work” didn’t mean anything to Leah’s grandmother, who even in 1898, the year of Leah’s wedding, had never heard of a world where people went somewhere to go to work, and certainly not a world where everyone in an entire family did so, where at least one person out of seven or eight or nine wasn’t working inside the house or tending the little vegetable patch in the yard nearby, where there weren’t at least a few children plucking chickens in the house even if their parents had gone to a market fair, a world where it was possible—normal, even—for a home to remain empty all day long. And so Leah’s grandmother banged and banged and banged on Leah’s door, for hours and hours. After the entire day had passed, she gave up, walked out of the building, returned to New York Harbor, and got on a ship going back to Europe. Leah ran after her, but her grandmother never turned around.