Saul spends the first bitterly cold weeks of 1941 trekking against the wind to the deli and then against the wind home in the dawn; somehow, it manages to shriek down whichever street he walks on. Little bits of news from Europe begin to filter through Saul’s meager network. The fragmented stories are guessed at by holding tattered letters up to the light, and whispered so softly from the mouths of still-seasick refugees that they come out as prayers. Saul cannot sleep for worry. In the darkest part of the night, he pictures his mother in the starring role of each of the bits of news he has heard. A whole village forced to dig its own grave and then lined up at the fresh earth edge and shot. Children sick, sweating together in work camps. Typhus and influenza spreading through the smaller-and-smaller Jewish ghettos like fire through haystacks. Men standing naked in the snow until their shivering slows and their eyes soften; their gold teeth collected for mantels and windowsills. Trains slicing across the tattered flesh of Poland, Austria, Hungary. It is inconceivable to be alive, to sleep on sheets, to close the door of his room behind him each morning, to drink coffee in the sun. Saul cannot decide whether he wishes he were there. There is something torturous about the filtered rumors on which he sustains himself, even as he is comforted by imagining his mother alive somewhere—anywhere. When he is sleeping his mouth sometimes forms the words of the Friday blessings. Baruch atah Adonai, he whispers. Blessed are You. While he is awake he will not speak to God, or cannot reconcile the idea of God and the sickness tormenting Europe. God isn’t so simple, he knows his mother would say. But his mother isn’t there to say it.

Whether or not Saul’s body would have survived that winter alone, it is almost certain that his mind and soul would have been worse for wear. But thankfully, Joey Colicchio appears again in the middle of February, this time at the front door of Saul’s boardinghouse. People in Europe are dying, swaths of them knocked down like dominoes, whole towns simply erased. The Family men are expecting a bigger tide of immigrants than ever to begin throwing themselves at the mercy of the Atlantic Ocean and Western bureaucracy.

The human instinct for survival kicks in when we least expect it. Desperate for some change, Saul accepts the job.

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