[question] Isaac’s death was an accident. You asked me that before also, do you think I have no memory and will give you another answer today just because you brought me poppy-seed cake? Which is by the way too dry and not so good. [note re inconsistency: the poppy-seed cake in question, purchased at a kosher bakery on Second Avenue, was made according to a traditional recipe, and was of the same type Esther Gottesfeld had praised on the occasion of the previous interviews in April and September of 1999. The bakery denies any change in the recipe in the intervening time. rz] I don’t know what you are looking for. This has nothing to do with history. The car had something wrong with the brakes, they said. And Isaac was maybe not so good a driver, even though everyone in the world thinks of himself he is a great driver, and nobody ever admits being a lousy driver, but maybe he was, I got to say, anyway he got himself into an accident the month before already. No mother wants to live to bury her child, I can tell you. It was a shock. A terrible thing. His wife, Rebecca’s mother, she was a decent person, not Jewish, but a decent person anyway. It was terrible also for Rebecca, to lose both her parents like that, her mother and her father, and she’s only eight years old. My own mother, you know about, I told you already about how she died when I was a little girl so long ago, and I never did see my father again after we came to America, but I know he is alive for those years. And he knows I am living in America, and that was something for him, even with the shock of hearing about my sister and the fire.

[question] Yes, I wrote to him that he had a grandson, so he knew about it. He wrote me back with sadness about Pauline and disappointment that I am not married to the father of my baby, and now it is too late to get married, so I have brought shame to the family, and also he had sadness about how I couldn’t send him money anymore.

[question] My papa? He was just an ordinary tailor, not so high up in the town, and not so good a businessman either. It was my mother who had the brains for business. I never saw my brothers again. My sister and I, we were sending them every month some money to come but after I stopped sending money they didn’t come and I never see them. I always hoped they would come. The baby, little Abie. I always waited to see him at my door. But they didn’t come. They must all be dead by now. I never heard.

[question] Why didn’t my papa come to America? He had got a new wife by then, the girl who was working for him, that was no surprise, I remember her from the town, a homely thing with a squint, but big bosoms she got, and she was very hardworking, and anyway, he was too old to start all over again. In America you got to be willing to make something new of yourself. He didn’t have the temperament for that. My mother—she would have loved America. Why he didn’t send any of the boys to me, I don’t know. Maybe they were afraid after what happened to my sister. I wrote to him to ask for that, but he didn’t say yes or no.