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child, and although my father and I were close, he was not a talkative man. Once my mother died, he spent most of his time in the furniture store they ran together. I don’t think he ever fully recovered from her death. We lived together amiably, but the house was haunted by my mother’s absence, and I spent as little time at home as I could. I was focused on engineering and on my career, and while I might have been interested in socializing, I had neither the time nor the confidence. I did have friends, but most of my contact with them was playing cricket on weekends. In my spare time I read—but until I met Michaela, I made no connection between the political philosophy I was interested in, and the realities we lived with.
    In contrast, your mother was a whirlwind. She thought quickly, moved rapidly, and spoke her mind. She gave the impression of knowing where she was going. At the university she knew everyone, began writing for the paper in her first year, and was voluble and opinionated. She loved music and had chosen it as her area of study, but I don’t think she ever intended to use it to earn a living, and in fact she never did. She had an attractive, open face, wide brown eyes and an infectious smile, and with her fair skin, her enthusiasm, and her slender figure, there had never been a lack of boys in her life. Luckily for me, she found them all immature and shallow.
    Like me, your mother was an only child; your grandfather, Samuel Davidson, was a dentist, your grandmother, Selma, a teacher. Even in the early 1950s when such activity was unheard of, Selma made it a condition of employment that her domestic servants be willing to learn the educational skills they were denied as black South Africans. Four evenings a week after supper, sitting around the kitchen table, she taught reading, arithmetic and basic science to a group that also sometimes included servants from neighboring homes, if their employers approved.
    As soon as your mother was old enough, she watched the classes, then she sat in on them, and finally, as a high school student, stood in as a relief teacher. And of course—it could only have been recognized in hindsight—the contact she had with domestic servants over the kitchen table at night gave her a respect for their intelligence and their personhood that was denied the rest of us.
    Both of your mother’s parents were opposed to the political direction South Africa was taking. Your grandmother was by far the more radical of the two, and your grandfather was horrified when it became clear that their daughter intended to put into practice what she had heard spoken in their home. He tried to dissuade her. The times were dangerous and the laws more stringent; the opposition had achieved frightening increases in power. The stakes were higher, he said, and she did not yet understand what price she might have to pay.
    But in the end, her father’s opposition was not equal to the combined weight of her mother’s radical commitment to change, and the anarchist leanings of her mother’s Russian parents. Michaela was so much a rebel by nature that it would have been strange had she not gravitated to the more extreme position.
    Eventually your grandfather Samuel realized that he could do no more for his daughter than he could do for his wife—that his job was to love them both, provide for and protect them as best he could, and, ultimately, let them live their lives. While Michaela was still at university, however, he thought he could still have an impact on her behavior and on her choices. About that he was mistaken—but about much else he could not have been more accurate.
    At the time we left South Africa, Steven, you were too young to understand its history. And when we reached Boston you were so intent on becoming an American that current events outside the United States were of no interest to you. As far as I know, you never took a course or read a book about the country of your birth. But to