Malkie, the eldest daughter, now approached, carrying a baby brother not yet three with his long golden ringlets and bib stained orange from mashed carrots or squash. You remember Malkie, of course. She was the second of the rebbetzin’s eleven children, seventeen years old at the time, flashing a large emerald-cut diamond ring, three carats minimum. She had just been engaged to a Crown Heights boy of excellent pedigree, first-class yikhus, but was obliged to wait to be married until a suitable bride could be found for her brother Shmuly, older by one year, who was much too fussy for his own good, according to reliable sources. A good daughter who still listened to her mother, Malkie took you in hand, escorted you to the corner of the table where the teenage girls were quarantined for everyone’s sake, introduced you, brought you in, performing the mitzvah of Jewish outreach by drawing you closer, which bottom line was the family business—Jewish missionaries snagging the souls of wandering Jews who had wandered too far.

I tried to pick up your frequencies at the table, to check on you to make sure you were at ease, but you were too distant on the women’s side, and with the din of platters coming and going, choreographed by the squad of Indian servants, men in livery all of them armed, and the clatter of cutlery and the buzz of conversation soaring into the singing by the men at the top of their lungs of the Sabbath zmirot, pounding their fists rhythmically on the tabletop, you were lost to me on the airwaves. I had been directed by the rebbetzin Mindy to a place close to the head of the table for some reason, perhaps my perceived distinguished paternal lineage I figured at first, where Rabbi Mendy sat in state. To his right on the women’s side, beside me on my left, was a wizened old woman from what I could see of her. Her head bound up in a tight babushka that defined the slope and cavities of her skull was lowered over the open prayer book on her plate as an indication that no food should be placed there, as if sanctified words alone would be her portion, like those proper ladies in novels who placed their handkerchiefs in their wineglass in a genteel refusal of wine and all gross spirits; someone’s mother, I presumed. On my other side sat an Israeli woman from the consulate, sunk in turgid Hebrew chatter with the woman to her right. It was such an awkward position for me to be in—to be so prominently situated yet so publicly ignored and excluded, I hoped you at your end were faring better socially. Maybe that was why Shmuly, the rabbi’s son and heir apparent seated with the men almost directly across from me to his father’s left took pity and leaned forward to draw me into conversation by asking me if it was true that my brother, Shmelke, believed that a woman who submits to the desires of a holy man can prevent another Holocaust. The old lady to my left lifted her face, black as if charred in a furnace. “Ah, you don’t remember me,” she whispered.