LEAH WAS just barely seventeen years old, pretty, but not exceptionally so. Her face was a little too round, her shoulders a little too low, but she had a tall, lithe figure and a brilliant smile, when she showed it. Her height made her awkward, and she walked everywhere with her shoulders slightly stooped, straining to look down at other people’s faces. She also had a small dimple in her chin which gave her no end of torment from the other girls in her old town, who told her that if you had a dimple in your chin, it meant your husband would die young. (“Don’t listen to these stupid people,” her mother told her. “You need them like a hole in your head.”) And she had blue eyes—blinding blue eyes, so bright that they practically overwhelmed her face. They were her most beautiful feature, but she had hated them ever since she was about ten years old, when a boy a year younger than she, a puny little thing squirming around his mother’s seat in the women’s section of the synagogue in their old town, told her she had “Cossack eyes.”

“No I don’t,” Leah had insisted, thinking he just meant she was a tough little lady, which she wasn’t.

“You do too. My uncle told me. You were born nine months after the pogrom, stupid. Didn’t you ever notice that everybody in your whole family has brown eyes except you?”

At that point the boy’s mother slapped him across the face. But after many weeks, Leah had asked her mother, timidly, choosing the moment with great care, about her blue eyes. Her mother, heaving a load of laundry out of a water barrel, simply said, “Don’t listen to these stupid people. People who have nothing better to do than tell stories should go bang their heads against the wall.” Seven years later they moved to America, where nobody looked at you long enough to notice what color your eyes were.

LEAH HAD heard a lot of things about New York—mostly, she realized later, from people who had never been there—but what no one had told her was that New York was a city filled with clocks. Clocks were ticking everywhere, patrolling high atop colossal buildings like watchmen guarding the city, posted on every wall like wardens guarding the rooms, shackling people’s pockets with their chains. You didn’t begin work at sunup, but at six o’clock. You didn’t end at sundown, but at eight o’clock, or nine o’clock, or half past nine. In the factory, Leah had to stitch three seams per minute. Per minute. Per minute.