My family immigrated from the village of Polinka, west of Kiev, long before the two wars, so were spared the wrenching legacy of Nazi horror. We were and are simply Jews in America, what the others back in the old country dreamed of becoming when they raced for the barb-wired borders. In fact, I’ve always detected a certain arrogance attached to this fact, as if “our people” were smarter than those others because “our people” got the fuck out of Dodge before the shooting started. But of course, that’s a lie, there was plenty of shooting in good ol’ mother Ukraine.

Picked from the pile, a sepia print. A real old-school bris, the baby laid out across the laps of the proud parents, the mohel standing behind them. Everyone stares vacantly at the camera with the nonreflexive eyes of traumatized Upton Sinclair–era immigrants freshly arrived from the shtetl. Every single person in this photograph, including the baby, is not only long dead and buried, but completely forgotten. On the day of that photograph, perhaps ninety years ago, each individual was immersed in the thick soup of his or her anxieties, blood and breath—and are all now dust. They are gone, the photographer is gone, the rabbi is gone, their children are gone and their children’s children are gone.

They say it takes three generations to forget. Is anyone remembered? Only the artists and killers and kings.

I was in Sadie’s living room, eating pound cake. Someone was shuffling through a sheaf of her personal correspondence. I snatched the letters to my lap. I am the literary representative of the family, I am the keeper of words. Something like a cantor, they all defer to me. (“Richard, what did you think of the President’s speech last night?” “Richard, what do you think of The Da Vinci Code?”) They know I’ve made money with my writing, been written about in Newsweek, won prizes, although not one of them could tell you why, nor has any of them ever made it all the way through one of my novels, but they do know I’m a somebody “out there”—they know I am of the world.

Sadie’s life had been so obvious for so long—her cleaning, her crumb cake, her soap operas—that whatever we thought we knew about her couldn’t possibly be the whole story. And my family didn’t want Sadie’s secrets. They’d rather sentimentalize the old woman who never said much, poached a mean gefilte fish, and worked as a secretary in a now defunct office building on a now defunct street in a now defunct downtown, fifty years ago. My gut told me to hang on to the letters.

Later, alone on my king-size bed at the Marriott, I read them.