Leah knew that it had been inscribed on a time sheet somewhere that it was better to be here than there, that there were more minutes here than there, a better life, a longer life, parceled out in a pretty wrapper and counted out minute by minute. But each time she looked at the clock above the assembly line, that clock that sometimes didn’t seem to move at all from one glance to the next, she thought of what she would have been doing at that moment over there—the stream where she sometimes waded on heavy summer days, the thick oozing ground in the nearby forest where she used to slide around in circles when she was supposed to be collecting firewood, the moment on clear winter evenings when she would find an excuse to step outside after dark and tilt her head back to a sheltering canopy of stars. Leah wanted a life made up not of minutes, but of moments.

Every Friday night before dinner in New York—the only meal that the family managed to eat together in New York, with all of them working different shifts—ritually, immediately after reciting the blessing over bread, Leah’s mother would add, “And thank God we’re out of that horrible place.” Leah’s little brothers had gotten in the habit of reciting the line with her, mimicking her exasperated sigh and following up the routine with vulgar jokes in English that their mother couldn’t understand. When they had finished their act, their mother would spit back at them: “You idiots can go bang your heads against the wall. That place is filled with dead Jews. Every inch of that entire continent is soaked with blood. Have you ever noticed that you never hear about people in America killing Jews?”

No, Leah later thought to herself, you never hear about people in America killing Jews. In America, Jews, so accustomed to being killed, take matters into their own hands and kill themselves.