Most of his assets had been left behind or liquidated. The cash had all gone toward bribes, first to get out of Vienna and then out of Amsterdam. He had approached the bribes with bewilderment, as if the lease on his life was running out and the rent had suddenly been jacked up to an exorbitant price, though still within his means. He had never tried very hard to make money, but he had discovered, as a young man, that he was one of those rare people who attracted money without trying to, as a magnet attracts iron. He had had a similar effect on women. When he arrived in America, though, he was shocked to discover that he was not a natural magnet but rather an artificial one, an electromagnet for which someone had slowly, gradually, turned off the power. When he first set foot in Frances’s house he knew his magnetic power was lost forever.

It was hard to pinpoint the moment when he became desperate. But if he had to, it would have to have been that evening when, after months of first assuming and then merely hoping that keeping up his friendships in high places would suffice to protect him, or that some mysterious visiting South African woman would fall in love with him and take him away with her, or that those who could pass some sort of written exam in German history would magically be deemed non-Jews, he finally bit the bullet, pulled out his fountain pen, and wrote to his mother’s brothers and sisters in the United States.

He had never met any of them before. In fact, he didn’t even remember their names. He had to rummage through thousands of pages of documents in the deep drawers of his desk before he managed to find the list his mother had given him about five years earlier with their addresses, on which she hadn’t even remembered to include her sisters’ new last names. The Dutch sounds of the places on the list surprised him. Stuyvesant. Hoboken. Bronx. He was alone in the bare apartment in Amsterdam that evening, sitting at the cramped, used desk by the window. (Where was Wilhelm that day? Nadav thought hard but couldn’t remember.)

“Dear _______,” he wrote in a Yiddish he barely remembered, filling in the names only later as he consulted his mother’s list of lost siblings. “I apologize for not keeping in touch.”

Apologize for not keeping in touch? Since when had he been responsible for keeping in touch? He crossed that out. Even kissing up to save his life wasn’t worth a humiliating lie. He tried again.

“Greetings from your European nephew. It has come to my attention that—” That what? That he was cornered against the dikes like a trapped rat? That all his successes meant nothing after all? That his mother, at the age of seventeen, had chosen to destroy her own life along with his?