As a person familiar with Yiddish sources, I also knew a lot about this period from articles, novels, and other sources written about this neighborhood at the time period—the situation of Jewish garment workers at the time is familiar to any student of Yiddish literature. Also, there was at the time a very popular advice column called “A Bintel Brief ” (A Bundle of Letters) in the largest New York Yiddish newspaper, parts of which have been published in English translation in book form. I read these letters and was incredibly moved by them, and many other details of this particular chapter come from there. For example, one letter describes how factory owners would “fix” the clocks in the factories by turning back the hands on the clock so that people would work longer than they were being paid to work. The tension between the old world religious life and the new world is also of course reflected in these letters. One letter is written by a man who divorced his wife and then decides he wants to remarry her, but he cannot because he is a cohen and now his wife is divorced! I drew on these details as well as other information I have through Yiddish literature in reconstructing this time and place.

Other items in the book are also historically accurate. The character Leah, for example, the child of a woman who was raped, is sixteen–seventeen years old in 1898 because there were pogroms in Yelizavetgrad and surrounding towns in Ukraine south of Kiev in the spring of 1881, during which many Jewish women were raped. Like Nadav and Isaac, many Jews were drafted into the Austro-Hungarian Army during World War I. There was a Montessori School in Amsterdam in the 1930s and 1940s which did expel its Jewish students when the Nuremberg Laws went into effect in Holland (one of these students was Anne Frank). I consulted maps of Amsterdam from this period and discovered that there were dozens of chocolate and candy factories, so Willem walks by a lot of them as he strolls through the city. The Carousel of Progress Ride is a real ride in Disney World, and it really was transplanted from the New York World’s Fair of the 1960s. Even a more recent detail is true: in 1999, there was in fact an early hominid skull that turned up in a gift shop in New York! I’m sure there are historical errors and even more historical stretches, but I did try to ensure the accuracy of the work.

How would you yourself weigh the story: is it primarily a new book of Job, or a specific sort of coming-of-age novel?