It was time to talk of the past, she said in a soft voice. It was time for Galina to know the full story. The words came slowly, as if she were still unsure of the right course of action.

Lidiya had often spoken about her own paternal grandparents, the cigar-making grandfather and the embroiderer grandmother, and her maternal grandparents, both of whom had been tailors. But about her own parents, Vera and Yuri Kogan, she had been largely silent.

‘This was a calculated decision,’ she now said. ‘I thought it was a cruel mother who’d saddle her child with a spoiled biography.’ She shrugged. ‘I still do. But there comes a time when you need your history. You need it to explain your country, and you need it to explain who you are. It’s time,’ she said. ‘It’s time to know where you’ve come from.’

The story of the Kogan family went back a long way, as Russian stories tended to do — before Stalin, before Lenin and the Revolution, before the 1905 uprising, before the Crimean Wars, before the tribe of Alexanders and Nicholases, before great Peter himself, right back to the famed rabbis of Prague.

‘But I’ll start in the early 1890s,’ Lidiya said. ‘With my own grandparents, your great-grandparents.’

She settled back on the couch, and her voice assumed a storytelling lilt. ‘My grandfather was a cigar-maker and my grandmother an embroiderer. They were considered useful Jews, and so were permitted to live in St Petersburg.’ Lidiya reached for a framed picture and handed it to Galina. ‘They knew how fortunate they were — their lives being so much better than those they’d left behind in the Pale. And they were fortunate, in every respect they were fortunate, except they had no children.’

Galina studied the young couple in the picture. They looked so serious, or perhaps they just looked sad, this couple that were unable to have children.

‘For years they longed for a child, and for years they were disappointed. Then, just when they’d given up hope, my grandmother found herself pregnant.’ Lidiya was smiling. ‘Their baby would be Yuri, my father, your grandfather.

‘In Russia’s long history there have been bad times, worse times, and the very worst times. This period when my grandmother became pregnant counted among the worst. People would notice her condition and say it was a terrible time to be bringing a baby into the world, people with four, five, six children of their own. Some would say there was never a good time to bring a Jewish baby into the world, but my grandparents were overjoyed.