They do not speak to each other. Once they are both inside the apartment, Willem’s father turns his back to Willem and returns to his desk. But Willem has noticed something new in the house. Sitting on the table are five envelopes, each addressed, in his father’s handwriting, to America.

Willem has noticed stacks of letters like these in the house two or three times before, but his father has always snatched them away before Willem could get a good look at them. But this time, glancing again at his father’s back, Willem reaches for them as silently as possible and flips through the little pile. Five letters, yes, all going to America. Three to New York, and two to somewhere he has never heard of: New Jersey. But the names on the letters intrigue him even more. They are strange names, weird names, names like the ones he remembers hearing at his grandmother’s house, long ago. Moyshe. Shmuel. Freydl. And all five of them seem to have the same last name, even though the addresses are all different. But they are also all American. Willem’s father has written it in giant letters on each of them: “U.S.A.” Who are these people? How does his father know them? Willem knows better than to ask questions. Instead he places the letters back on the table exactly as they were and slinks into his bedroom, shutting the door behind him.

He had been hungry before, and tired, and cold. But now, lying on his mattress on the floor, he can think of nothing but those letters. In Willem’s dreams, the names on the envelopes come to life, five people dancing in a circle in some giant American house, and Willem dances in the center. Between their shouts of laughter, Willem hears the sounds of someone pounding on the door. It is his father, but they refuse to let him in.

AS AN old man, Bill Landsmann doesn’t like movies. He prefers slides, leaving context to the imagination, writing his own script. Instead of a movie, Bill Landsmann might have presented, to anyone who wanted to see it, a single image: his father sitting in the window writing a letter, framed only by possibility, unaware that this moment was already buried under so many other moments that came after it—unaware, sitting behind the thin pane of glass, that he was drowning in all the choices that would ultimately destroy him.

CHAPTER 4

THE MISSING LINK

THREE YEARS after Jason, on Amsterdam Avenue, Leora finally found the tefillin.

Work had become the focus of Leora’s life, and she excelled at it. She had mastered her own journalistic method after a single conversation, which had taken place when she was twenty years old, at her college’s newspaper office. She had come in a bit late that evening, and when she arrived, the office was buzzing as it hardly ever did. Most of the time, the paper ran front-page stories about things as pressing as the retirement of a dean. But that night several phones were ringing at once, editors and reporters were shouting into them, and computer printers were spitting out pages and pages of type. Leora stood at the door utterly confused, like a lost foreign exchange student trying to decide whether she had entered the right room. Jessica, one of the senior editors who would later be hired by a major metropolitan daily, saw her and jumped to the entrance.