She took a deep breath, then another, and fought to straighten up. Rochel and her warmth beckoned her.

Soon they were on a wide street, where a horse-drawn tram traveled on tracks in its center, just as Moskowitz had described, and passengers jumped on and off. When Grabovsky pushed Batya to climb in, she grabbed a handle for support and swung inside. To her relief, a passenger seated nearby rose to jump off. She fell into his seat.

From the tram window she saw dilapidated two- and three-story houses, laundry hanging from every window. Bedraggled men wearing yarmulkes lugged baskets, carried water pails, fixed broken stairs, or offered meager belongings for sale. A band of filthy children hit empty cans with sticks, then set upon an emaciated dog, laughing as they whacked its bony back and ribs. Through ground-floor windows Batya noticed women in headscarves hunched over sewing machines, while above them women with painted faces leaned out second- and third-floor windows, calling out to passersby. One of them dangled huge breasts, barely covered, over the windowsill.

Life seemed to be lived outside: A cobbler hammered shoe soles; a barber pulled a screaming client’s tooth to the guffaws of onlookers; women cooked on balconies; men played cards on rickety tables between houses; a tinsmith soldered a broken pot over a fire. A knife sharpener pumped a foot pedal to turn his stone, and its screech prickled the hair roots on Batya’s arms.

Some of the ground floors of houses served as shops. Through their doors, Batya glimpsed mounds of rolled cloth, meat and chicken hanging on hooks, housewares piled on shelves. Yiddish signs announced a bakery, a tailor’s shop, a bookstore, a tobacco store, and an apothecary. A moneylender sat outside his shop at a small table, a lockbox at his elbow. A woman bargained loudly with a yarmulke-wearing vegetable vendor. Farther down another street, three women rooted through a pile of alte-zachen on the cart of a ragman. Two men hauled boxes of produce, and two others unloaded furniture. Occasionally, Batya glimpsed through an open gate a shabby courtyard filled with stoves, a water well, barrels, and piles of lumber beneath the ever-present sagging laundry lines.

The houses, made of clay and stone with buckling walls and peeling plaster, were so different from the low mud-and-straw huts of the shtetl, and even from the better ones built of wood planks. Yet, for all their differences, the filth and poverty had the familiar feel of the world she’d left behind. This place was as far from the Buenos Aires of Moskowitz’s description as Russia’s snowy hills.