“I like vampires,” I added slyly. “I think that they are beautiful.”

My father did not hear the lust in my praise. He did not, since it was not directed at him, hear my praise at all. I think he would be okay with incest. He could forgive the moral horror for the glory of another woman wanting him.

“Ruby, I’m not kidding: you’re perpetuating a legend whose root finds itself in fear of the Eastern European coming to America and sucking the lifeblood out of the economy. A lost tribe of outcasts, wandering the earth, trying to pass as ‘ordinary.’ I wouldn’t joke about vampires.”

“I’m twelve,” I told myself again, for my father was no longer listening. When his theory was finished, my usefulness was finished too, because, for my father, the point of other humans—women, children, friends, and enemies—was to listen to him be clever. And then leave. In later years, I would see other men talking the way he did. They were at industry parties, and their jaws ground like jackhammers and they kept coming out of the bathrooms with red noses.

I didn’t know what anti-Semitism meant. I knew that anti meant against. But against what? There was a lot of sex talk in our house—intellectual discussions about eroticism. Semitism sounded like it was bound to be something sexy too. I decided that people were jealous of the Jews because we were too sexy. In retrospect, thinking about Kirk Douglas and Lauren Bacall, the twelve-year-old me was probably right.

Liev was carved in the shape of sex, in the texture of sex, and anointed with its scent. I tried to pinpoint the epicenter of it all. One day, sitting in his lap, I traced the point from where it was emanating to the shiny gold Star of David around his neck. It nestled in the black chest hair that sprouted from his selection of V-neck sweaters. Although he always wore his sweaters with nothing underneath them, he never had sweat stains and he always smelled good.

The first time I got close enough to know how he smelled was at the debut of his artwork, a collection that my parents had sponsored. The “opening” was held in our front room. Liev was remarkably cool. My father was not. His biggest worry in reference to other people was not that they might be sad or nervous, but that something they might do, eat, breathe, or sleep, let alone make, would reflect badly on him. He was quite the wrong kind of man to discover new talent, and yet he had been right time and time again.