The reason no one answered, of course, was that they were all at work. But “at work” didn’t mean anything to Leah’s grandmother, who even in 1898, the year of Leah’s wedding, had never heard of a world where people went somewhere to go to work, and certainly not a world where everyone in an entire family did so, where at least one person out of seven or eight or nine wasn’t working inside the house or tending the little vegetable patch in the yard nearby, where there weren’t at least a few children plucking chickens in the house even if their parents had gone to a market fair, a world where it was possible—normal, even—for a home to remain empty all day long. And so Leah’s grandmother banged and banged and banged on Leah’s door, for hours and hours. After the entire day had passed, she gave up, walked out of the building, returned to New York Harbor, and got on a ship going back to Europe. Leah ran after her, but her grandmother never turned around.

Leah remembered that night of dreams as she lay in bed at 99 Orchard Street many months later, in the same bed where she had dreamed those dreams the night before her wedding—a narrow iron cot in the kitchen of her family’s three-room apartment, shared with her ten-year-old sister Freydl, who this time, just like on that night before the wedding, snored at the top of her lungs through the entire night while grinding her heels into Leah’s calves and thumping her head against the wall, almost as if on purpose. “Frances,” they called her in English at school. Their parents slept in a bedroom about five feet away. Leah’s three younger brothers slept in the living room under the same blanket, their heads on the sofa and their legs balanced on crates. During most months there were also a series of boarders who would take turns sleeping either on the floor or on a row of boxes next to the boys on the sofa, men in their twenties and thirties who worked hours so long that the family only saw them asleep. Only Leah’s older sister Rachel had escaped the apartment, but even she had not made it out of 99. She and her husband lay right on the other side of the ceiling above Leah’s head, trying to make a baby as they had been trying for the past three years. The great tragedy of Rachel’s twenty-one years of life was that she could not become pregnant.

It was about five in the morning, almost time to get up for work. Leah felt her stomach lurch in the darkness of the windowless room. She kicked at Freydl to free herself from the cot, swung her pale legs onto the filthy floor, and rushed to the deep metal sink with its water bucket, in which she promptly threw up. As she had done almost every morning for the past three weeks.