First he bought a complete set of the works of Spinoza, all with actual miniature text inside them. Then a small TV—which didn’t actually work, to Jake’s great regret, though it glowed a blank white at the push of a tiny button—and a VCR that actually accepted miniature nonfunctional videotapes and spit them back out with the tap of a miniature “Eject” button. Jake purchased tiny fake copies of Gandhi, Chariots of Fire, and The Ten Commandments, among others. He bought a set of silvery candlesticks with miniature white candles in them (although lighting them, the saleswoman warned, was not recommended), a silvery wine goblet, and blue and white china service to go on top of an intricately embroidered white tablecloth. He bought a miniature wooden easel, and then miniature palettes, paintbrushes, and a set of oil paints—real paints, of course, miraculously squeezed into incredibly tiny paint tubes, though only a doll could have the agility to actually apply them with a brush to a canvas.

But Jake wasn’t looking for a canvas. Instead he set out for the home utilities section of the show—booths selling miniature hardware, where one could outfit a dollhouse with indoor plumbing, doorknobs, window shades, flagstone porches, and, most importantly, indoor electric lighting. It took some time, but at last, in a booth that exclusively sold miniature light fixtures, Jake found exactly what he needed: a small light panel that could be installed directly on the miniature easel. The perfect size for a slide.

FRANCES WAS only about ten years older than Nadav, which depressed him. To him she was an old, fat, washed-out woman, the sort of person whose presence would have embarrassed him at a party in Vienna. But in her dumpy two-family American house, she was the queen of the castle, and Nadav Landsmann—along with his son Wilhelm, or Bill, as Wilhelm was now called—was her prisoner.

On the night in question, a drab winter evening late in 1946, their little family had assembled around the horrible yellow “breakfast nook” in the blinding linoleum-wrapped kitchen. Only Nadav was eating, forcing down oily chicken soup as Frances, his salvation from the Valley of the Shadow of Death and to whom he owed his eternal gratitude forever and ever in the land of the living, watched him eat. Wilhelm was out, as usual—out with a girl, some American girl he had been going with for a while now, though Nadav still couldn’t remember her name. Frances and her husband Joe, a thick, silent man with more fat than brains, weren’t eating with him because they were going to a cousin’s wedding. Nadav had not been invited, and for that reason he had been looking forward to this particular evening for weeks.

“Make sure you eat all the soup, it’s getting cold,” Frances chirped. “Look at him, Joe, he’s turning into a pile of dried-out bones.”