Under the guise of a school project, Naomi had once “interviewed” Bill Landsmann, and he had given her all the stupid details of his life. Born in Vienna, no brothers or sisters. Left Vienna with his father for Amsterdam, then left Amsterdam for America. His mother remained behind in a hospital and apparently died. There was nothing in his story to thrill the American moviegoer, no tattooed numbers on anyone’s arms. But the real story, the real movie of Bill Landsmann’s life, would have disappointed Naomi—and Leora too, and every other person Naomi knew—more than she or anyone else could have imagined. And that was why, instead, he showed people nothing but slides.

Recast it. The lead will be played not by a cute seven-year-old child but by an underdeveloped, antisocial twelve-year-old boy—himself, that is—with sick thoughts about girls and an archipelago of pimples clinging to the left corner of his mouth. The role of the Bad Guy will be played by a Jew, details to follow. Strike the set. No more plush apartments; instead build a set of two nearly empty rooms, furnished with nothing but a desk, a little table, two chairs, and some mattresses on the floor. And rewrite the script so that what was lost is what was really lost—not the city apartments, not the music boxes, not the Royal Copenhagen china, not all the things that can easily be replaced in some other country a few decades later, but a language, a literature, a held hand, an entire world lived and breathed in the image of God. This is the movie Naomi never saw, because Bill Landsmann never showed her.

IN THE OPENING CREDITS of this imaginary film, Wilhelm Landsmann—or Bill Landsmann, in the subtitles—has just landed in Amsterdam. Shipwrecked, if you will, or, more accurately, landwrecked. Of course, “just” doesn’t really mean much at this point. How long has it been since the wreckage? A few months? A few years? It scarcely matters. He will always feel as if he has just arrived. Wilhelm has “just” become Willem, the second of three names—the third being Bill—that he will use in a period of less than five years.

His Dutch is abysmal. “His” Dutch. A European way of speaking, he decides years later, claiming languages as one’s own, as if each person owned a little piece of German or French or Dutch, or a great big piece, and some languages have more to go around than others. In school he slowly picks up Dutch, but Dutch doesn’t pick him up in return—he can understand all the insults the other children whisper at him, but he doesn’t speak back. German is his, or at least was his. But now he has stopped speaking German, and as a result of “his” Dutch not really being his, he speaks nothing at all. Instead he wanders around the city of Amsterdam, silently creeping around its streets and wishing he could somehow run away and go home.

All of Amsterdam reminds Willem of a rat trap. Crooked little streets, crooked little buildings with hidden dead ends at every turn. You walk home from school, a terrible place—although it is Montessori, and therefore a Very Good School—where each classroom is stacked on top of another and where they put the new kid, right after he arrives and despite the supposed “open classroom” philosophy, in a seat at the back of the room. (Willem didn’t remain in that school. Kicked out by Montessori, he had to go to the Jewish school, and at the new school, speaking German was not only discouraged but expressly forbidden. By some quirk of fate, however, he found himself assigned to a seat at the back of the room even there. Someone always has to sit at the back of the room.)