One day, long after he had given up hope, Nadav received a letter with the return address “Irvington, New Jersey.” In a bubbly, babbling Yiddish spiked with random English words like “college” and “retail” that Nadav had to look up in one of Wilhelm’s dictionaries, his mother’s younger sister Freydl wrote that of course she remembered him, or maybe not “remembered” exactly, since they had never met, but she knew him, or felt like she knew him, because ever since his mother had left home they had talked of nothing else when she was a girl, about how her sister had a baby so far away, and it was such a tragedy how the father had died before the baby was even born, before anyone in the family even met him, and her sister had sent a picture of the baby which in fact she herself now had sitting on her dresser, can you imagine, all these years Nadav’s image had been on her dresser and now out of nowhere he was writing to her, she could hardly believe it that here he was all grown up, and with a son too (and here something was crossed out in thick black ink: a reference to his unmentioned wife? Nadav sighed with relief at the small vestige of courtesy that kept Freydl from asking about her), and she was sorry she hadn’t written back to him sooner, she knew how urgent the situation was, but her younger daughter just got married and she had been quite distracted, and she didn’t have a single second to write until just then, since she had been so busy arranging the food, and the flowers, and the guest lists, and the music, and the daughter’s new apartment, but now that it was over she could help him out, she would do whatever she possibly could, and actually it was better that she had waited until the wedding was over because now she could even offer him and his son the room at her house where her daughters had lived, now that the girls were all grown up, it goes so fast, doesn’t it, as a father himself he should know what she was talking about, one day they’re babies and the next day, well, she even still thought of him too as a baby, since that was all she had of him, that old baby picture, isn’t it incredible how the time goes by, but in fact she could even give him a job in the business she and her husband owned, at least until he got up on his own feet again—oh, she could hardly even imagine him standing on two feet, all she could see when she thought of him was that baby, poor little one!—and it would make it much easier for him, moving to a new country and everything, to at least be with the family. She signed the letter, in English characters, “Frances.” Underneath her signature, she wrote, in spaced Hebrew letters printed like a child’s, “Freydl.” In quotation marks.