Here was her own birth certificate, Esther’s naturalization papers from 1912, a canceled mortgage document for an address in Brooklyn (which Rebecca realized must be the little house where her father grew up, once the grocery store was prosperous enough so they didn’t have to live in the back anymore, though Esther had moved from there to the house in Flatbush where she had lived when Rebecca was little). Here was the marriage license for Isaac Gottesfeld and Barbara Edwards, paper-clipped to a short newspaper article Rebecca had never seen before, a two-paragraph description of the car accident on Flatbush Avenue that had killed her mother and father the year she turned eight. The paper clip had left a rust stain on the clipping and on the marriage license, which was a negative image printed on shiny paper, folded into quarters that were almost completely torn along two of the worn fold creases. Barbara Edwards, age thirty-one, had married Isaac Gottesfeld, age thirty-eight, on July 22, 1950, at Borough Hall in Brooklyn. Rebecca recognized neither the addresses they gave nor the signature of the witness. A friend? She supposed it might have been a stranger they found loitering in Borough Hall, or a clerk. Rosemary Gianelli, who lived at 63 Joralemon Street. Rebecca wondered where she was now, if she would recall having witnessed this wedding. How had Barbara and Isaac spent their three years alone together before Rebecca’s birth? She knew so much less about them than she knew about her grandmother.

Barbara’s parents, Rebecca s grandparents, lived in Grosse Point, Michigan, and were only somewhat more devastated by their only child’s death than they had apparently been by her decision to marry an impecunious Jew. Perhaps for them it had seemed like a logical sequence of incidents, the inevitable outcome of events once she started on this unfortunate path. They had sent Rebecca small, impersonal (“WASPy,” explained Esther) birthday gifts until she went to college in Vermont, which was paid for by a Hodgson family trust established by Rebecca’s long-dead great-grandfather, who had made his money in railroads and real estate. Grandmother Edwards had made it clear to Rebecca that the college tuition payments, which they were legally bound to offer, would be the extent and limit of her Edwards family legacy. In order to get the tuition money, she had been made to sign an agreement relinquishing further claims to numerous family trusts, which had been notarized by the secretary at the Workmen’s Circle office, where Esther worked part-time, after the Women’s Trade Union League was closed.

“They treat you like this because their blood is so thin, people like your mother’s family,” Esther had fumed, while the secretary, an elderly kvetch who had worked in the fur trade, got out her special official embosser. “They’re going to die rich with everything comfortable, and they got to send their lawyers with papers to protect their money from their greedy Jewish granddaughter. Shame on them.”

Roger and Grace Edwards lived their final years on the outskirts of Grosse Point in an assisted-living facility with its own golf course. Rebecca had hardly ever thought about them, and she assumed they had hardly ever thought about her, except when they sent her their annual printed Christmas card, on which Grandmother Edwards always conscientiously crossed out the “Merry Christmas” and wrote in “Season’s Greetings” as her way of showing awareness of their only granddaughter’s regrettable heritage. They were essentially strangers. When Rebecca was in graduate school, word came from their attorney’s office that they had died, first Grace and then Roger, only a month apart. The letter was accompanied by photocopies of the documentation to remind her that she was not entitled to any inheritance.