Leora dropped the rest of the mail, littering the vestibule with a blizzard of notices with their Important Information Enclosed and ripped open the overstuffed envelope, forgetting entirely to check the return address. Inside were wads of plastic bubble wrap, alongside of which she found an index card. She took it out and read its unfamiliar flattened handwriting:

Leora, I’m sorry I can’t make it today. Hope this makes up for it—Jake.

P.S. The Mouse House was out of my price range.

Below that was a line written in smooth Hebrew script:

Ezekiel, Chapter 37, verses 13–14:

. . . as I opened your graves, O my people, and brought you up out of them, I shall put my spirit in you and you shall live . . .

Inside the bubble wrap, she found the tefillin.

Chapter 5 Go Bang Your Head Against the Wall

CHAPTER 5

GO BANG YOUR HEAD
AGAINST THE WALL

THE NIGHT before her wedding, Naomi’s great-great-grandmother Leah had a dream. Leah dreamt that her family had written to her grandmother to tell her about the wedding, and her grandmother, despite the horror and length and expense and absurdity of the journey—first the trip to the port, which could take weeks in itself, and then in steerage class to New York Harbor—had miraculously decided to come. To surprise them, in effect, since sending a letter to warn them would have taken too long.

So Leah’s grandmother made the journey in the hull of a ship, handling her nausea like royalty in front of the other vomiting immigrants, and sailed into New York. The immigration officers at Ellis Island couldn’t believe that someone had come to America all the way from a town south of Kiev just to attend her granddaughter’s wedding, but in the dream Leah’s grandmother convinced them, and found her way to Manhattan and finally to Orchard Street, where she could hardly believe what she saw. Giant buildings rising out of the street, as huge as palaces in her eyes, row upon row of them, an endless canyon carved from cliffs of brick and iron. She found 99 Orchard Street and opened the door. Then she climbed up the stairs, glowing orange from the new gaslights, to Leah’s apartment, bewildered by the building’s many stories, the identical doors that appeared at every turn. She lifted her tiny wrinkled hand and banged on Leah’s door. No one answered. She banged again. No response.